Extending & Restoring Botanical Artworks in Adobe Photoshop

1. Introduction & Class Overview: If you create your own botanical artwork or work with vintage botanical illustrations and occasionally find yourself needing to restore missing elements along the edges or within the illustrations to prepare them for use in designs, collages, surface patterns, or simply as finished artworks, then this class is for you. Hey, guys, I'm Janie Homart Creative, and as a graphic designer, I love using vintage images in my collages, patterns, and designs. And I teach a few popular in depth classes on these subjects. And in this short class, I'm excited to share my workflow for quickly and effortlessly extending botanical illustrations and generating missing elements using the Generative Fill and expand tools in Adobe Photoshop. Apart from expanding the image and generating new parts within the illustration itself, I'll also show you how to seamlessly combine your original illustration with the generated elements and how to replace uneven or stained paper textures with the clean, solid color background, both preserving the original artwork and keep it retouching to a minimum. So grab your own botanical artwork, any vintage botanical print from an online archive or one of the images I have shared in the class reverses, let's get started with this image restoration technique that can save you a lot of time and effort. 2. Preparing the Image for Extension: Before we start extending the image, we need to quickly prepare it in order to get the best and more predictable results when using the generative features and to preserve the original artwork elements so that they can be seamlessly combined with the generated extensions later on. With your image open in Adobe Photoshop, start by selecting the crop tool and crop your image to remove any unnecessary details. If the elements you want to extend sit right at the edges of your image, you can immediately crop straight through them. But in this print, there are both illustration elements which extend further than the ones I need to regenerate and some additional design elements that I want to preserve. So in this case, I'm just going to make an initial crop to help the whole print sit NIA on the canvas and remove any extra paper texture around it. At this stage, make sure that the delete cropped pixels is checked in the options bar, and when you're happy with your crop, hit Enter. Then go to the Window menu and open the contextual task bar if it is not already visible. Next, it is time to create another crop and cut through any elements at the edges to prepare them for extension. But before doing that, uncheck delete cropped pixels in order to be able to bring back any elements that will get cropped out at this stage. Then reduce the size of the crop box, so it cuts through any elements you want to extend, making sure it creates a clean edge through these shapes. When ready, hit Enter to apply the crop, then select the entire canvas, switch to the move tool, and copy and paste the selection onto a new layer. You will now have two layers, the bottom one with the full original image, and the second one, which is cropped at the edges. This cropped layer is the one we'll work with to extend the image. Now with our image prepared, we are ready to extend the canvas and generate the Nissen parts. M 3. Extending the Illustration with Generative Expand: With the image crop, now we can move on to reconstructing the missing elements around the edges using the Generative expand. So hide the original layer for now and select the cropped layer in the layers panel. With the second crop layer selected, switch back to the crop tool and extend the canvas to the size you want. Then go to the contextual task bar. Click Generative Expand. Choose the Firefly fill and Expand model, and click Generate. Then sit back and wait for the results. Once the results appear, go through the variations and choose the one you like the most. If some variations look good in terms of the illustration details, but contain some random generated elements like these extra drawings, just ignore them because they are very easy to remove. Select the variation you like best and then click on this button to enhance details. And here is your generative expand layer ready. If you would like to keep alternative generations as a backup, this is a good time to duplicate the generative layer. I usually create e copy and rasterize it for editing and keep the original generative layer hidden until I know that I don't need it anymore. But that said, if you prefer, you can also simply work with the generative layer directly. Generative Expand usually works pretty well, but it can also generate a few extra details that you'll want to remove. In the next lesson, I'll show you a quick way of cleaning up your image. 4. Cleaning Up the Generated Extension: The generated extension is a great starting point. But for the best result, you need to remove any unwanted generated elements and clean up the image. To do this, you need to work with a layer mask that's already applied to the generative layer, select the mask thumbnail in the layers panel. This mask reveals the newly extended areas on the canvas, as you can see from the thumbnail. To remove any random element, I like to start with the Lasota and quickly draw a selection around the illustration. Then I invert the selection and fill it with black to hide these areas around the outside. The lasso tool is super quick and easy to use, but you just need to remember that if you use it to deselect all once you're done in order to be able to use other tools with the whole canvas. You can continue using the Lasso tool for small areas, but I usually switch to the brush tool and use a hard round brush to paint over any areas I need to remove. If using the brush tool, make sure black is set as the foreground color and carefully paint over any weed or unnecessary generated elements. Whilst working with the mask, remember that you're only affecting the extended areas and the original image is revealed for the mask. So go through and remove any messy details from the extension, then hide the cropped layer and turn the original full image layer back on. Now you can combine the original illustration with the generated extension more carefully. 5. Combining the Original & Generated Artwork: One of the biggest advantages of this workflow is that you don't have to rely entirely on the generated result and can easily combine your AI generated extension with the original artwork to avoid any graphic errors and to create Emo considered final image. It helps to toggle the generative layer on and off a few times to see what has changed and then return to the layer mask and start masking out any generated parts that overlap the original illustration. For example, here, I'll mask this area to reveal the original part of the illustration. Next, this leaf here was regenerated during the expansion, so I will quickly bring back the original version. And here is another leaf fragment that I'd prefer to restore from the original image. Now the illustration looks much better. We have preserved most of the original artwork, whilst only using AI to reconstruct the missing edges. So this is how you can quickly expand your image and generate details around the edges. But if some elements are missing within the artwork, you'll need to rebuild them using the generative fill, and I'll share my special tips and tricks for getting the best results in the next lesson. Um, 6. Restoring Details with Generative Fill: If you need to restore a missing element inside the illustration, for example, like this incomplete leaf here, you can use the Generative Fill instead. In order to do so, start by drawing a selection with the Lasso tool, making sure it overlaps with the existing part of the element you want to extend. Then select the original image layer. Go to the contextual task bar, click Generative Fill and type your prompt. Sometimes you can leave the prompt empty, but adding a simple word like leaf or even the specific plant name can help get better results. So with your prompt ready, click Generate. Wait for the results, and then look through them. For this first set, I use the Firefly fill and Expand model, which works reasonably well stylistically, but in this case, isn't perfect in terms of the contextual accuracy. So I will switch to the Firefly image free model and generate a few more variations for comparison. Some of these new results have better shapes but slightly weaker details. So I'll go and generate a few more hoping to get something better. And this one looks fairly good. The details aren't quite as good as in the first version, but the shape integrates nicely with the illustration. So I'll go ahead and use it. But of course, you can carry on generating even more results until you get something which works really well. So use this technique and the generative fill to restore any details within your illustration. And keep in mind that the shape of the original selection you draw with the lasso tool determines the size and shape of the generated element. So be sure to nail the selection before you start generating anything. And when you're done restoring the illustration, the final step is to clean up the background and prepare the final image. 7. Cleaning the Background & Finalising the Artwork: Once you're done generating elements, you can close the contextual task bar. And now let's bring everything together into a clean final composition with a solid color background. If you want to keep the document and your workflow fully nondestructive, you can group all of the layers and convert them into a smart object. Or if you're not planning to revisit any masks or generations, you can simply merge the layers instead. I usually prefer working non destructively with smart objects, but they can drastically increase the file size. So in this case, I will work with the merged layers. Once you have a single image layer or smart object, go to the Add new fill or adjustment layer button and create a solid color fill. Use any color for now, place the fill layer below your image, and then double click on the color thumbnail and sample a color from the original background. And if necessary, zoom and close to pick a particular hue, tint or shade. With the background color ready, now let's quickly remove the uneven texture of the original paper. If you're working with rasterized layer, convert it to a smart object first so that you can work non destructive. Then press Command L or Control L in Windows to open the levels adjustment, select the white eye drop atol and click on the image to set the white point. You can hold Option or Okey in Windows to preview which areas have been affected, then continue clicking until the background becomes mostly even and clean. But don't worry about any larger and darker stains because it is better to remove them later separately. Once the background looks clean without losing details in the illustration, adjust the muttons later if necessary to fine tune the contrast. And when ready, hit. Then set the blending mode of your image layer to multiply, and you immediately see the uneven background disappear. Because the background color was sampled from the original image, the color is multiplied over it, stay very close to the original, and the whole image looks much cleaner. Now, if you want, you can slightly tweak the background color and make it lighter or a little less saturated. And with this done, now you can clean up any remaining dust or stains in the image. So add a layer mask to the image layer and paint over small imperfections with black if you find larger stains that can simply be masked, you can revisit the levels adjustment and refine the white point further. But in this case, I'll actually keep this most stain because it adds a bit of character to the image. And instead, I'll just concentrate on removing the dust around the illustration. And that's the extended and cleaned up image ready. So let's re publs class with a few ideas for how you can use this technique in your own projects. Um, 8. Final Thoughts & Conclusion: As you can see, the whole process of restoring and rebuilding the elements is pretty quick and easy and doesn't require any complex manual retouching or reconstruction. If you work with vintage botanical prints that have some missing elements or your own scanned artwork or sketchbook pages that have awkward details at the edges or towards the spine, this is a really fast way to create missing elements and clean up your images so that they can be then used as they are as art prints or taken a little further for use in designs or surface patterns. If you need to isolate your artwork from the background, be sure to check out my in depth class about creating botanical designs to learn how to effectively and cleanly cut out your illustrations, as well as more image restoration techniques, including retouching the elements and adjusting and retouching the colors, and the complete workflow for creating print ready botanical designs. If you would like to explore other ways of working creatively with vintage imagery, be sure to check out our classes about creating digital collages, minimalist graphic prints and surface patterns. For your class project, extend and restore your own scanned artwork or a vintage botanical print and do not hesitate to use one of the vintage images I have shared in the class resources to quickly get on with practicing the techniques. Create a project in the projects and resources tab for this class and share the original image and your final restored and extended version. Along with any variants and work in progress images, you might snap a screenshot throughout the process. If you have found this class helpful, please leave a review in the review tab for this class. It really means a lot to us and helps our students discover our classes. If you have any sort of questions, do not hesitate to leave a comment in the discussion stub for this class. Then I'll happily answer and provide feedback. And be sure to follow us here on Skillshare to be the first to know about our new classes and updates. So let's sit for this little class. I hope this workflow will help you restore vintage botanical illustrations or your discount artwork more easily and quickly. Thank you for watching this class, and I hope to see you in our other classes.