LARGER:
http://static.zooomr.com/images/4504755_abd08d9ac6_b.jpg

This is a scan of an old school type photo I took in 2000, July, in northern Japan (Rebun island one of the most northern islands that are not contested with Russia). This photo was not making me happy as it was and I did quite a bit of restoration work on it to get the result posted here. Here is the process with a link to the original posted at the end.

First, I made three copies of the photo. One I over exposed, one I softened and one was left as scanned (lightened a little). The as scanned version is for the strange cloud formation as it was good as is. The over exposed one was to light the buildings around the harbor at the bottom left and the soft one was to remove some noise in the clouds in the upper right corner.

Next, I created an image with three layers in Gimp, and placed the copies on top of each other. For the image for the buildings I removed all but what you see that is dark in the lower left corner, and some of the water. If you look close you can see some of the water in the little bay there has color from the sunset and then darker waves are breaking over them. The light area is part of the layer for the buildings and the breaking waves were created by me (More on that later). There was a lot of noise from dust on the scanner and scratches in the photo that showed up in this dark area as hundreds of little white spots. I touched all those up by hand, painfully slow and dull. Then merged that layer with the "straight off the scanner" layer. Next I used various sample and brush tools to create a breaking wave effect to cover the difference in lightness of the water where the cut was made. Hopefully it seems as a wave that is not catching the light well is breaking over the still water in the bay there that does have the light. Would you have know had I not said anything?

Lastly I cut out all but the clouds in the upper right corner area, (maybe some of the top and down the right side as well) leaving the softer clouds there that hid some of the noise from the scan there (you can still see some in the blue sky about half way down the right side there, but I did not want to get to crazy and was spending too much time on this restoration as it was).


Before editing (not found in my public photos at zooomr):

http://static.zooomr.com/images/4678915_d40dc0e954.jpg

Wow, cool cloud formation?

GEO Tag added now

Wow. That is gorgeous!