This is a picture of a picture. You can see parts of the frame at the top and bottom. I can see lots of dirt on the original picture so I'm not sure how to approach clean-up and not lose the depth and details of the original picture to the point that the person looks unnatural. I hope this makes sense.

Thanks,
Sylvia Morris

I got this far with just two simple steps.

1 Recrop to remove frame edges
2. Levels adjustment

Did you manually adjust the levels or use the auto adjust? When I used the auto adjust, I was afraid it was looking too dark. Here is my version.

Here is another version lightened up.

Sorry. Wrong picture.

welcome back, sylvia :)

i always like to start with the easiest part and that's usually the background. i simply cloned it a bit cleaner.

i then went over the face and suit and cloned out any major specs.

i then ran digital camera noise removal.

then a clarify at about strength 7. then adds some depth to the image. but it also adds a bit of grain at times.

so, clean up the grain. i did this with airbrushing. i used a very mixed opacity brush, a mixture of opacities all in one brush. i then dabbed on various shades of gray in different places to even up skin texture a bit.

i also cleaned up the tie and shirt the same way.

after that i selected out the camera right part of the suit, made a copy to a new layer, mirrored it and pasted it over the camera left side to hide that half. i then smudged a tiny bit that was missing here and there.

that gave me a pretty good suit, but i had to clone in the edge to fill it out and i cloned in the bottom half to remove that black line that exists on the other half... i think maybe it was a pocket and i didnt want a pocket on both halves.

to finish i ran a lighter opacity clone to finish cleaning up the background, smooth it out a bit. and i added a brightness/contrast adjustment layer to brighten everything up a bit. i also added a tiny bit more clarify and a tiny bit more airbrush to clean that up.

and that was pretty much it. i'm a little curious about the tie. it seemed like it was painted or airbrushed in, so, i pushed up the edges a bit to give it slightly more definition and added a little texture, but it seemed odd in the original.

Wow! I think you brought him back to life. His features look very realistic as if the picture could have been taken yesterday. I agree with you about the tie and even some other elements. It looks like it was drawn on. This is a picture of my grandfather and they were very poor. I surprised he has such a nice portrait that was manually touched up!

Well I did the Swampy crop and levels and added neat image. Nothing more.

thanks, sylvia :) there's a bit more that could be done, now that i look at it again posted here. there's still a bit too much texture/splotchiness in the face but that's easily corrected.

if you notice his original hair, you'll see that part of it is blacked out/smudged/stained all black. i had to add some highlights there to make it look more natural. i actually did that with cloning from other highlights in the hair.

and the camera left side of the suit was too badly stained. much easier in this case to simply take the camera right half and paste it in camera left.

i wasnt sure what you wanted to do with the framing, so i left it in. you might think about getting the whole framing in the scan. it seems like a nice frame.

here's my go, notice any changes :D

Well I did the Swampy crop and levels and added neat image. Nothing more.

It looks good, Phil. It appears you used more blurring with Neat Image.

Sylvia

thanks, sylvia :) there's a bit more that could be done, now that i look at it again posted here. there's still a bit too much texture/splotchiness in the face but that's easily corrected.

if you notice his original hair, you'll see that part of it is blacked out/smudged/stained all black. i had to add some highlights there to make it look more natural. i actually did that with cloning from other highlights in the hair.

and the camera left side of the suit was too badly stained. much easier in this case to simply take the camera right half and paste it in camera left.

i wasnt sure what you wanted to do with the framing, so i left it in. you might think about getting the whole framing in the scan. it seems like a nice frame.

What you did was very nice but some of it was beyond my skill level such as replacing the left or right side of the suit. Great solution but I haven't learned anything about that yet. The frame was actually cut off on the picture I had so all I have to work with are the top and bottom parts of the frame. What you did was very good.

here's my go, notice any changes :D

Very nice! I LOVE his new tie!!!

Hi,

So, this is a color version i've done. Hope you like it :)

Greetings,
Konrad

I never even considered colorizing him. Nice colors!

sylvia,

doing the copying of the one side to the other isnt too difficult. you simply make a selection of the good side, mirror it, make a new blank layer to put it on, paste it down and then touch it up with smudge or clone.

because this was an easy selection (no hair or rough edges or anything to deal with) i simply used 'edit selection' in Paint Shop Pro. this allows you to paint on the area you want selected. you use the grayscale shades to do the painting. completely white means completely opaque and a solid black erases the paint. grays inbetween the white and black give you a semi-opaque selection based on how dark or light the gray is. when you've got it how you want it, you simply hit edit selection again to convert your 'paint' to a selection.

from there you pick 'promote selection to new layer' and it takes just the selected part and puts it on a new layer. you then remove the 'marching ants' of the selection with your selection tool. simply right click over it with that and it pastes the selection down and is no longer a selection and you're left with just the image part.

you then select that layer, if it' not selected already, and use 'mirror' to flop it over, as if you were now seeing it in a mirror. use the move tool to move it over to the other side of the suit and drop it where you want it.

you can combine a couple of those steps by simply mirroring it while it's still a selection and move it with the selection tool too. then simply right click to remove it as a selection.

if you're using photoshop instead of Paint Shop Pro, i'm pretty sure the same procedure works there, but some things may have different names. check this web site for help on translating psp into Photoshop and ps into psp: THIS LINK (http://paintshoppro.info/tutorials/photoshop_to_paintshoppro_dictionary.htm)