This forum was a great help on my last endeavor, so thought I'd get your opinion on this one as well. I don't even know where to begin with this one.

A pic of my great-grandparents on their wedding day in 1916. (My great-grandmother was 16 and he was 36!)

Anyway, I may need to wait to do this one until I get more experience, but just thought I might take a stab at it.

I thought getting the contrast and brightness correct would be the best place to start... Levels... Shadow/Highlights, etc. then start working on the damage.

I normally would convert to grayscale, restore, then add the sepia tone back in at the end.

Thanks!!

ok, first thing... dont convert to grayscale! you lose information in the channels... or rather, you cant use the channels as well, might be a bettter way of saying it. just desaturate it if you want black and white. use hue/sat.

second, yes, you want to correct the lighting. the first step of restoring is to find out what's there. and this is a good example of that. bring out the detail and in this pic it means getting some contrasting going. levels, curves, brightness/contrast, shadows/midtones/highlights, and in psp, 'clarify'.

and this is why you dont want to go grayscale. in photos like this, often one channel has more detail than another. some are often so bad (often the blue channel) that it's better to completely replace one channel with another. other times you can just correct one channel. if you go grayscale, you lose a lot of that.

and, also take a look at 'channel mixer' and 'hue/sat' as a way of fixing a particular channel. often, you dont even need to separate the channels out; you just use channel mixer or hue/sat. curves can also be of use this way, since you can pick one channel to run a curve on. and levels are the same way.

once you get some detail/contrast back in the image, you're going to have to do some reconstruction, but we can deal with that when you're ready :)

I'm really glad I found this forum :)

I never even thought about the channels, so I will never again convert to grayscale first!

Again, thanks for the tips.

you're welcome :)

This is what I have so far with regards to trying to get the lighting correct.

I believe I need to work more on the lower left portion, as it still seems washed out to me.

Thanks!

Tammy

Hi Tammy

I agree with Craig.. don't make drastic changes unless it is the last result.

I think you have a good start. If you do use contrast try to limit your changes to where they are needed not globally

Butch

Butch-
Wow, amazing. Looks really good.


So after a few hours, here's another attempt. :)

What I did was select different areas either with the lasso or quick mask, then feathered the selection, and applied Shadows/Highlights, Level, and/or Curves until the area looked better.

So here it is.

Ok, I have it posted in the critique section now. Your advice was great! :)

New Post in Critique Forum (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/critiques/16761-please-critique-beginner.html#post149759)