I've been working with this image all day now, and I can't seem to get it to do what I want to do. :tired:

For the most part, I'm able to restore large portions of the picture pretty easily, but the tree on the left, the fence on the right and the boy's skin tones keep coming out weird.

If anyone could take a crack at this and explain to me how you fixed it, I'd be most appreciative.

http://www.webnower.com/matthew.tif

Thank you very much for any help :)

Brent, a QuickTime photo? Can you upload it as a JPEG?

Brent, you didn't say what you _wanted_ to do with the photo, just that what you were doing wasn't working for you.

I did an Auto Color adjustment, dust and scratches (very light), a Curves adjustment to bring up the red channel (tongues are suposed to be pink), and a highpass sharpen.

I'm just trying to restore the original quality of the photo and make it look like new... I think it sat in the sun or something for too long at one point.

Your redo looks very good!

I just did a quick levels adjustment (only using the black and white points then manually moving the middle slider to my taste). This produced good results but a bit cold so I applied a selective color layer to add just a hint of warmth back. As for the fence on the right side the colors on the right inch or so of the photo seemed a bit fadded so I selected that area only and applied selective color adjustments to correct.