Hi

I am having serious difficulty with this image of my grandma. I am working on a project for her for xmas and I have tried every tutorial on the web I could find and none of them will restore this photo or make it look a lot cleaner. All I really care about is the image of the little girl not so much the background. If there is anyone who can help with this I would be greatly appreciative. I uploaded it to my ftp because it is a large file and I wanted to be able to shrink it down without losing quality. You can click on the following link to get to it!

http://www.altereddiva.com/cabcardsoriginal/babygirldress.jpg


Thanks

Melissa

Melissa, welcome to RetouchPRO! The R and G channels are pretty blown out but there is good detail in the B. Use Image>Apply Image command or just copy the blue channel to a new grayscale document, duplicate it twice with the blend mode set to Multiply. Aternately you could just apply a curve or levels adjustment to the blue channel new document. Next run a Noise Filter on a mild setting to remove some of the very fine noise. The rest will be patient, hard work with the clone tool and healing brushes to clean up all of the specks and spots and scratches. You can extract / erase the background but I would be incline to just mask out the girl and blur the background as it is. You can later tone it (like sepia) or hand color it but it will probably look fine in B&W.
Regards, Murray

Spent 15 minutes on without trying to make look like it was shot yesterday.

Happy Thanksgiving.


[EDIT]

I also posted to my website a full size, b&W image with a different crop.
This one with much less retouching.
http://www.franklopes.com/public_images/girl2a.jpg


Hi
http://www.altereddiva.com/cabcardsoriginal/babygirldress.jpg
Melissa

WOW!! You both are amazing!! It looks unbelievable! I can actually see her in the pic without her blending into the background. B&W looks great I wasn't really sure if it was a B&W or sepia pic anyway. Well I guess my grandma was right she does look like my daughter! This is fantastic!! Thank you both so much! This will make her present so much more better!!

Melissa

Bit late but I had a go at this, blue channel, curves, healing brush and patch tool mainly then put her on a desaturated background of a poppy field.

Christine