I just found this forum, and the wealth of information is amazing! I'm trying to clean up a picture of my husband's family, but it isn't going to well. There are lots of scratches on the photo, numerous ones on facial areas. The face of the older man on the left and the neck of the woman on the right seem to be the real problem areas. I'm using Paint Shop Pro Photo XI. I've been using the scratch tool with moderate success. I tried to "eraser" with using multiple layers, but that didn't work so well because there are so many scratches. The despeckle, salt and pepper and other noise reduction filters seemed to make the picture very blurry. Cloning on the black areas seemed to be very noticeable, so I also tried airbrushing them with limited success. I'm just a beginner, so I'll take any points to the right direction.

Here is the original picture with no edits.
http://www.laurencarissa.com/hair/trial.jpg

icydove, welcome to RetouchPRO.

well, you've been trying the right tools, but they do take practice. without loading this myself into Paint Shop Pro xi, i'd say clone on the areas mentioned. if you're getting a lot of clone marks, simply reduce the opacity on the clone tool and overlap your cloning. also work into a given area from more than one direction. the most common mistake with cloning is over-doing it, trying to do too much at one go. clone is best used with a sort of nibbling technique where you only take very small amounts, using a very small brush and a medium opacity to start. on finer areas, you'd use even less opacity and even a smaller brush. it's a bit of an art form and takes practice.

also, do your cloning onto a blank layer over your other layers. just set the tool to 'use all layers'.

and on your image, you might also look at raising the contrast a bit. you've got some fading there and it might help to handle that before the cloning. brightness/contrast, curves, levels might all work. or you could try the shadows/midtones/highlights filter.

Thank you for your help. I wasn't sure if I should try to bump the contrast, etc., before or after the edits, so that answered another question.

you can actually do it either way, but in this case, i'd say before just to make the other actions easier.

and you're welcome.

Hi,

I'm using Photoshop CS2 but what I did should work with Paint Shop Pro.

1. I straightened and cropped the photo
2. Ran it through Neat Image - this removed most of the scratches
3, resized the image by 100%
4. worked on the faces ( the only restoration on the photo) Man's face used clone and blur tool, Young mans face, painted damaged areas of face and cap with airbrush at about 60% opacity, Lady's Face used only blur tool, working across the damaged and Undamaged areas to blend the damage out.
5. Levels adjustment.
6. resize to original size.

http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/1505/trialcropvv3.jpg

With the detail available I found cloning the least valuable option, painting with reduced opacity, taking frequent colour samples, probably the best, Smudging worked well also, combined with painting probably better.

I did no restoration work on the rest of the image, all improvement there was by Neat Image, This is only a quick and nasty job to show what can be done,
its taken me longer to type this post than I spent working on the Image.


Max