I hope anyone can help me figure out how to fix this photo. I have photoshop cs2 and have been working on this photo for days. I can get rid of the noise but I then I get blur and lose detail of the faces. I would love any advice whatsoever. Please Please help a newbie.

Thanks,
Kellie

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y233/dimples37398/karioldphoto.jpg

hi greeneyez and welcome to RP.

is the image you posted the original or the one you worked on? if it's not the original, could you post that also?

The one I posted is the original here is the best I could do at helping it at all. I am new to this and I am hoping somebody has some advice on it. I am not sure if there is any hope for it or not. The first one I posted is smaller than the original file. Someone scanned this one and sent it to me, so I can't rescan it. I am not sure how to post the original file size here. Here is the only thing I could do with it. I have photoshop cs2 again by the way....

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y233/dimples37398/karioldphotocopy123copy.jpg

Thanks so much for any advice...

Kellie

Let me see if it will let me attach the original in original size and resolution that it was sent to me....I tried to upload the original size photo and it says it is too big to upload here.

Any advice or help will be so so much appreciated.....

Kellie

Kellie, welcome to RP!
The blue channel is in pretty bad shape. I used a channel mixer to basically replace it with mostly the green channel then applied a Hue/Sat adj layer to shift the skin tones back to normal. Finally applied Noiseware noise filter to remove some of the noise.
Removing the noise is always a trade off between noise and detail preservation. Unfortunately the image is out of focus, noisy and weak to begin with. Working on a higher res scan would likely produce better results.
Regards, Murray

generally, noise removers blur as part of the process. so, the first thing i did was to sharpen.

high pass sharpen about 5 to 7 radius.

duplicate that and unsharp mask 5/100/5

duplicate, salt and pepper filter at 5/5

new blank layer over that and smudge and airbrush a bit. both of these at low strengths.

gausian blur that layer VERY lightly. i used 1

another blank layer and a tiny bit more smudge.

there's more that could be done, but this was rather quick. if you zoom in you'll see how quick :) but at a zoom of 100% it looks mostly ok.

Thanks so much for trying, It definately does have numerous problems to begin with. I guess this wasn't the easiest first photo to try and restore huh...lol...Thanks again...any other advice will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Kellie

Wow that was definately a good attempt at making it alot better..I still have a whole lot to learn and all this help is great....

Thanks again.....

Kellie

Did a levels adjustment using the eye droppers and setting the black point as being behind the tree trunk, the white point as being the doll's dress and the grey point as being the weatherboards just peeking through the bushes. Did a highpass to sharpen and placed in overlay mode. Merged all layers to a new copy. Used Byro's degrunge to take out some of the noise especially from the faces and neck (found in tutorials here)

Tried something..not sure it worked so well. The Blue channel is history. So I changed the MODE to CMYK then copy the CYAN/MAGENTA (which equal BLUE). Then change the mode back RGB open the RGB channel to blue and paste. The CMYK copy will replace the Blue channel. (a lot cleaner in theory)

Once I had this I used the LEVEL ADJUSTMENT White and Gray point, and ran a couple of Hue/sat..
Not sure if it any better the the original but it was fun.

Lasa