http://www.carsynfoster.com/Brent.jpg

Hello Phaqu and welcome to RetouchPRO. Yes, this picture can be improved. Would you be able to share with us which program you run on your computer and your level of retouching skills? What have you attempted to date to restore this picture?

dc

Thanks for the welcome! I have photoshop cs2 and have tried to fix it and can't get the background to look right. I would say I have pretty good retouching skills. my attempt:
http://www.carsynfoster.com/Bcolor.jpg

I guess everyone is scared of this one!

Your options are somewhat limited. You could use the clone tool for about 50 hours but that might not be the best approach. If you were a good artist (which I am not) then you could paint over the damage and texture it. Another option you should consider is to give it an artistic style with one of the PS filters. For example below, I used the Filter > Texture > Craquelure. You may find that giving the image an arty texture may be pleasant to view - perhaps as much as the result you may get by trying to paint over all those cracks.
Good luck with the restoration,
Regards, Murray

hehehe, murray, you are such a cheat! :D i love it :)

and phaqu, welcome to RP.

yes, it's fixable. how much time do you want to put into it? and do you want to restore and dress it up, or just restore?

i dont know of any simple way to do this. to me it's a clone, airbrush and smudge job with some color correction in there somewhere to restore the skin tones.

there may be a shorter way, but i couldnt find one.

I don't want to spend 50 hours on it but I would take some time to make it better than it is if anyone has some suggestions that would help.

I tested what Murray suggested (different texture though), and it seems to be good trick for images like this.

Here is what i did (picture is wip):

Duplicate layer -> remove noise -> new layer mask (hide all) -> paint over bad parts (don't paint over eyes, mouth etc. to keep them sharp)

Now duplicate this layer and test various blending modes and see what fits the best. You may want to do this multiple times.

Now most of the bad parts are gone and it's easy to heal rest of the pic.

Hue/Saturation
Texture filter

Thanks everyone, I will work on it some and see what I can come up with from the suggestions.

phaqu, basically, if you want to truly restore it, i see a four to 8 hour job on this. it's not an easy one. you could try FFT and that might remove some of the finer cracking and cut down the work. and, you could try some noise removal software, but i doubt it's really going to do the job very well. i see this as mostly a clone job and that means careful work taking time. i even tried the double multiply and move one layer ever so slightly and that does remove a little bit, but not enough.

it's just a badly damaged image and that means some careful, time consuming work to fix it.

You really need to rescan it. The image you posted is very blurry as is apparent because even the cracks are very blurry. Anyway, I used the technique in this post:

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/photo-restoration/15292-cracks-stains-galore.html#post135748

...to get rid of most of the cracks in a couple of minutes. It'll work 100% better once you rescan to get the image (and the cracks) in sharp focus. Then, using the principle that zekeode used, you mask out the facial areas where you want to do some manual work. In my case, the masks are also generated using a blurred and tone adjusted version of the image itself. Then I did a few minutes worth of reconstruction, but didn't put much time into it.

Bart