Hi, firstly, a few apologies:

1. I am veeeery new to photo manipulation, in fact, I'd say I'm an out & out novice! Have to apologise for complacency as I worked for Eastman Kodak for over 6 years :shocked:

2. I suspect some of you are anti angling :o: .. the foto obviously is me catching (and releasing!) a fish.. great memories as I fished with my son in France for the first time :classic:

3. I'm not the most photogenic.. apologies for the nightmares my mug shot is no doubt about to cause tonight :wink:

ok.. all that out the way.. can anyone please provide advice as to how I re-work this foto?.. I think my lad took it whilst having macro selected.. doh! The fish weighed over 50lbs so is quite special in its own right (for me anyway) but I would like to have the errors corrected, a silver halide type photo printed and hung on my wall.

Hope you can help, even if it's a case of recommending a firm that can sort out this fotofor me..

many thanks, Gary

Hi Gary

I did what I could, but I'm afraid you'll have to keep this image small. Increasing the size would only magnify the problems.

I sharpened then I painted over the blown out patches with colors similar to those of the surrounding areas.

Pierre

I had time to do the other one.

Pierre

lots of little things done here, and no time to explain them right now.

welcome to RP, btw :)

Craig

I dont really remember my sequence because my phone rang 5 times but here was my go... :blush:

I used portions from the original and used a mask to bring out the parts of the repaired duplicate I wanted to keep. I know that much I just don't remember what exactly I did for saturation, etc.

I had to reduce my quality on here so bleh... my original was better and probably would be through email.

I had another go at this. I sharpened a bit more and kept the background blurred. Pushing the foreground even more would have made it too noisy and cartoony.

Pierre

Hi Gary. Welcome to RetouchPro.

Great Catch. (But I’m glad you put it back)

Can’t do much more about the fish but you could improve this photo if you took another picture of yourself. We could superimpose a new sharper you onto this picture. Try to get the lighting and pose/angle similar. And if you post it I’ll add it for you.

Ken

wow!!! really didn't expect this many helpful responses.. many thanks! ..and sorry for the delay in gtting back to this.. one word "WORK" :( probably don' need to say anymore on that one.

Really do appreciate your efforts here but I suspect you're working with something that can't be sorted in its current form. I really like the idea about superimposing me from another image and I should be able to do that as I have several photo's (good one's) with me in that position from previous captures. I'll see if I can dig one out.. also, the original photo's before posting on here were larger but not by a long way, circa 150kb, which is really strange as I used to use a Kodak DC5000 and the average image size was 600KB with that camera and I'm now using a 4 meg Samsung didgimax 401... something to do with the macro function maybe?

I'll also take a look on the camera and transfer software as I may be losing some of the image quality during transer.

thanks again for your help and advice.

something to do with the macro function maybe?

just checked out the file sizes on the camera... all those taken in France on the fishing trip are around 100K in size.. all those taken since I flipped the macro switch back to normal mode are around 1meg in size.. that probably confirms I'm stuffed and can only work with very low res' photo's :thmbdwn: ... can you be honest with me here.. am I on a hiding to nothing trying to get something worth keeping from the shots?

thx

Quick look at photos, not entirely all bad I don't think. First one
1. Duplicate Layer, blending mode multiply.
2. Copy Merged
3. Dodge Burn Grey Layer to tone background and lighten face
4. Copy Merged
5. Highpass layer to increase detail - overlay blending

Second One
1. Duplicate Layer
2. Dodge Burn Grey Layer to deepen background and lighten face
3. Copy Merged.
4. Fairly strong highpass layer

I'm just begining to play in the retouch arena but this may be better handled by the photo to art group. Converting to art will hide many of the problems will allowing you to increase the image size