Well I've been working on this photo for weeks now for a dear old friend. Her husband has passed away and this is the only photo she has from their dating days and I wanted to just do this for her. The original is tiny (1x1.5 in) and very bad as far as dust and scratches. I've learned a whole lot so far on this project, especially about Layer Masks thanks to the tutorials here. I tried to not be too agressive in the dust/scratch removal because I don't want the result to lose too much of the original info. I can't list all the things I've done to this but I'm still not happy with his face and I wonder if anyone would have an idea about what that military uniform that is and what the badge should look like. All I know is that he did flying and the closest I could find on the web to what that badge looks like is US Army Airforce Unasigned badge.
I did use Noiseworks (like neatimage) at the end but his face is still pretty bad. I did a version where I applied the dust and scratches filter pretty aggressivelly, and it just lost too much sharpness and didn't look anything like the original anymore.
Also any ideas about scanning this thing? I ended up scanning it at the highest resolution my scanner would go (2400dpi) to get as much info as possible and then resized down to 300 dpi. It seems like it helped quite a bit as my earlier scans at 300 and 450 dpi didn't extract quite as much detail.
Any comments, advice...etc

WhidbeyPix,

The attached photo, found on the web, jibes pretty closely with my recollection (derived from combination of images from war movies and the memory of my dad's old uniforms hanging in the attic) of what that uniform looked like. There was, I think, a lot of variation between one theater and another, one season and another, etc.

The background of the shoulder patch may have been darker, but that's a pretty small nit to pick.

You definitely have your work cut out for you on this one and I think you've acquitted yourself honorably so far. Good luck. These are memories worth preserving. We're losing those guys at a rapid clip.

dc

Here's my attempt at restoring the face. I basically "repainted" the entire face. I'm afraid I've lost the likeness though.

On thing I noticed on the original post, you said you scanned your image as high as your scanner could (2400 dpi).

That probably caused the scanner to interpolate the image. Most scanners claim to scan higher than they can actually scan.

I would try scanning it again at 600 dpi (a good level to start with) and see if the image is any cleaner. Also make sure your scanning software doesn't sharpen or try to clean up the image.

- Noel

That will also help you increase the size of your photo with very little to no pixalation.

http://www.graficalicus.com/downloadbasket/categories.php?cat_id=2&sessionid=ba55e7c042ae6a6b19db09f027c27833

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=US+Army+Air+force+Unassigned+badge&spell=1

I typed exactly what you said into google and found what I think you want in the 2nd search result

http://www.angelfire.com/md2/patches/uniform/uni2shirt.html

I've attached an image of the patch here that I matched up fairly closely if you wanted to drop it into your image.

Good try photomaster, it's a tough one, although you're right the facial features are somewhat different. I want to stay as close as possible to the original.

Videosean... that's the badge I've been trying to duplicate, although the copy you found is excellent and it looks like it would paste right into the photo.

This is all pretty fascinating to me.
About scanning, I think I'm done with that since I've returned the original already. I have a tendency to lose stuff (with 3 young kids stuff dissapears too) and I don't trust myself with such treasures.
I think I'm happy with the scan, it's the restoration techniques I'm missing.
I might also ask for another photo of him, even if it's a few years later, it would give me a good idea about the facial features.
Again, thanks for your responses.