I am a total novice and am in awe of some of the work that I've seen in these forums -- I use Photoshop Elements 3 on a PC and am trying to learn to restore. Would some of you please give me ideas on what to do with this photo -- I have exhausted my knowledge at this point. Thanks in advance.

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/members/flora.html

The first thing to do would be to read on "how to post". Your picture is small and it makes it hard to see the details. 100K is allowed. That is a starting place.

hi momatx, and welcome to RetouchPRO.

well, as a novice, i think you've done quite well. you brought out the image more and cleaned up a lot of the damage.

on the downside, i think you've over-contrasted a bit here. the whites are a bit too white, at least in the dress. and your cloning/smudging is a bit off here and there in the background.

i had a try with this image too, and i found that the lighting presented some problems i wasnt expecting. i ended up using brightness/contrast, curves, levels, histogram adjustment and clarify and some more than once. and i also used a hue/sat layer to desaturate and adjust lighting a bit. i kept a bit of the sepia rather than go completely black and white. this tends to preserve the 'old' look a bit.

and that was the first part of what i did. that was all to get the lighting more in line and to bring out some more detail.

after that it was mostly cloning in the background followed by some airbrushing and cloning on the face and dog. i removed a number of spots on the dress also. and somewhere in there was a very light 'digital camera noise removal' to lessen the noise. this latter one also surprised me a bit as i was expecting to have to use a medium to heavy setting and ended up going very light with it.

and for a final treatment i airbrushed over the background and did a 'push' (heavy smudge in photoshop) on the face for small detail work. i find that clone, when you get down to about a 4 pixel brush or so is not as good as a simple push brush for the very small work.

Thank you so much for the detailed response - I really appreciate your time. (I just tried to upload the files in a larger size per the first responders suggestion, but keep getting errors).
I just have a few questions about your response -- for instance, what is clarify? Is that a Paint Shop Pro tool, and if so, is there a comparable one in Photoshop Elements? Is the term "Push" explained anywhere?
Most of the steps you mentioned - levels, hue/sat, etc. I did use in my attempts - I had a very difficult time as you said bringing up the whites without going overboard. I am finding this to be a very frustrating, but very satisfying activity and appreciate your time.
Marianne

I think you did a very good job, the white might be too white and the dog is to drak..
Used Photoshop CS, I started out by Healing patch the big stuff (didn't use the clone since the image is very pixaled due to the size..a little bluring wasn't going to hurt) Then duplicated the cleaned up layer, and ran it thru NOISEWARE at full suppresion it pretty much left the head as it but over softened the rest so I simply masked (white) and painted the mask with a 20% black bring back traces of detail, the dress and dog fur leaving, leaving the rest pretty much noise free.

Then added a level / curve / hue-sat to taste.

Then I added a super weak unsharpen..wanted to add more but I felt the picture couldn't take it.

Lasa

hi marianne,

clarfiy is a Paint Shop Pro filter. dont know what the equivalent is in photoshop. basically, it's a contrasting filter. it tends to enhance the shadows and highlights a bit. i often use this to find and bring out detail more. you could try the shadows/midtones/highlights filter in Photoshop. that might be similar.

push was described to me as a 'heavy smudge' in photoshop... opacity turned up all the way. it is a smudging brush. smudge in Paint Shop Pro tends to do a feathering from where you start to where you finish and it only goes a short distance. push keeps the opacity and doesnt feather so much. thus, you can drag the smudge further without it losing the effect along the way. it's great for doing long edges and tiny work.