A friend has asked me to fix up this photo for him. One of his concerns is the blur, although I know that I can only do so much unsharp masking.

Any suggestions for fixing the blur?

As for scanning... I'm using my Canoscan LiDE 90 home scanner. Would there be much advantage to getting the image professionally scanned?

I'm also looking for other suggestions on color/levels correction. The eyes and hair are very dark, registering somewhere around RGB: 25-10-10 which gives hardly any detail to work with.

I'd love to hear your ideas. Thanks.

Ken

Ken, I only had a couple of minutes left right now so I just started and it may not be the best route. The shadows are badly plugged, the blue channel is in pretty bad shape. Does the original look that bad or did the scanner drop a lot of detail?
Anyway, the approach I took was to duplicate the background layer, invert the new layer, and change its blend mode to overlay with a tweak of the opacity. Then a Hue/Sat adjustment and a Shadows/Highlight adjustment.
From here you would need to do some selective color adjusts or hue sat adjusts to get the colors realigned, in particular the skin. I may get more time to play with it later tonight.
Regards, Murray

Yes the original does look bad. The shadow areas are almost a complete blackout (is that what you meant by "plugged"?). I'm not sure if I should get it professionally scanned or not.

I really liked your invert-overlay technique. I did the same, along with some color correction, and came up with this: (I haven't yet healed all of the specks from the image).

Hi there

I did not have much luck either.. especially with the blur. I did try to tone down the colors somewhat.

Butch

I think you're right about toning down the colors. The original makes them look like they just got back from a month in Jamaica. What was your desaturation method?

Ken

Hi,

I did more or less what Murray did:

* Shadow/Highlight Adjustment Layer

* Selective Colors Adjustment Layer

* Hue Saturation Adjustment Layer

As for the sharpening I used a very soft USM .... It might not be what you had in mind ... but, personally, I think that oversharpening a blurred image might look worse than the original blurring ...

Well My result is a little darker than the others, but what I did to correct the blur is to blur it more with Neat Image and after that sharpen by copying the layer using overlay blending mode and a High Pass filter at about 5.

The combo of using Neat Image followed by sharpening seems to work at times for me.

i took flora's nicely cleaned up image and ran it through Unshake. settings were: normal, portrait, 10, x2. i could have gone stronger but this would add quite a bit of noise. likewise, i could have run a usm on this but that also would tend to add more noise. as it stands, it already needs a bit of noise cleanup, which i didnt do.

focus magic shld also be able to help it, but Unshake is a freebie :)

.jpg compression for posting here was 31, so bear that in mind also.

craig

What I did was:
copy the background layer, apply channel mixer adjustment layer, make it monochrome, lower the red and green and incdrease the blue.
set that layer's blending mode to luminosity
flatten all layers and decrease the saturation of the reds and yellows.

Thanks everyone. I'll give it another shot and post my work.

Ken

This seems to be the best I can come up with. I can't bring out detail that isn't there anymore.

I had this image re-scanned at the local photo shop, and it seems to be of better quality than my original scan. There doesn't seem to be much I can do for the eyes unfortunately. I was almost tempted to throw in some fake detail, perhaps a tiny glow from the corneas.

Ken