My daughter found this photo in an old steamer trunk in the attic of the house they just bought in Camben, Maine. She gave it to me tonight and asked if there was any way to bring out more detail. I understand the concept of layers but in practise I confess that I am unable to make the quantum leap between theory and acceptable results. This young woman is quite striking and the pose is reminiscent of WW II pinups. Any suggestions? Perhaps levels/curves and some amount of layering?

Hi Geezer,

Had a quick go with your picture.

First, to increase picture density, I copied to a new layer, then set blend mode to multiply.

Then adjusted levels to improve contrast a little.

New layer and cloned out a few blemishes.

Flattened Image.

Did rough selection round Writing, and copied to new layer.

Selected picture area and copied to new layer.

New layer under picture area layer, and filled with colour for surround.

Click on signature, and use background eraser to erase around the writing to get rid of old background.

Hope this helps.

Oh, I produced 2 versions, one thats greyscale, and one with the tint of the original.

Image has posterised a little, this would'nt be a problem with a larger file, such as the original scan.

As usual i like to have a go as i'm so much a novice and need the practice so i hope you don't mind.

I don't have the skill that Gary has and also feel that it's difficult to know what is good/bad and like a lot of image manipulation and restoration when you have never seen the original it's a bit hit and miss (as far as i'm concerned).

I put back the original border into my attempt as i felt it added character to the image. Not necessarily what you want for printing out a restored image but there ya go.

Firstly i cut out the subject image from the scanned frame.

I then desaturated it to turn it into a black and white image hoping to keep the image 'simple' whilst i manipulated it.I first duplicated the layer and set the opacity at 60% and the blending mode at multiply and flattened it thus darkening the image .I then applied a gradient adjustment layer with the gradient running from top left to bottom right set at an opacity of 50%. My hopes here were to balance out the brightness and contrast of the image leading through the subject to the darker sand area.
I then used the reduce noise filter in CS2 (see i've got a lot of help by using CS2). To smooth out the noise and the jpeg artefacts. I then adjusted the brightness and contrast further 'till i was happy as i could be with it.
To give the image a hue i used a light mixture of blue and cyan via the colour balance tool. I then put it back into the photos border and tried to match the 2 by modding the frame also.

Without replacing the sky i couldn't manage to do anything about the posterization. If someone knows a trick of minimising posterization (other than higher resolution scans and pics) it'd be good to know.

Nice work Nacoya. I particularly like the idea of the gradient mask, it's worked well, and balances the image nicely.

i first cropped the picture.... too much beach, not enough girl.

checked the historgram window and pretty much confirmed what you see... too much luminance. used histogram adjust and histogram stretch to reduce.

used a layer of salt and pepper noise reduction at 3/3
another layer for sharpen more
an adjustment layer for curves
another layer for multiply
another layer of Fast Fix plugin

adjusted opacities of the above to suit

copied out visible image to new image and used a bit more noise reduction, texture preserving smooth and edge preserving smooth in small quantities.

cloned out remaining blemishes.

had i been a little smarter, after cloning, i would have doubled the image size for more detail and then done the rest.

Craig

Just wanted to do the tiniest tweak before i hit the sack.

Took out some more noise and it didn't sit right as the ripples were engulfed in the blur so i used a quick mask to protect the close in textures of the sea from the blur and then for good measure the tiniest bit of warming photo filter.

That's me done this time. Part of my problem is knowing when enough is enough :lol: