I am working on the family photos which have been stored in those horrible sticky albums, and am starting with a) my favourites and B) the most damaged.

This photo I adore of my grandmother, and want it the best it can be.
52801
I see four problems:
Yellow cast
Original image slightly out of focus
Original image washed out in the details
faint lines/honeycomb throughout the image from textured paper

I am new to this so I am a bit stuck as to where to start...

Using ideas for removing the colour cast first I created these:

5280252803

I am thinking of this order of action:
1. levels/colour
2. remove texture
3. overall saturation level
4. sharpen

Does this sound ok?

if this is the best it can be, I am happy as I dont want an artificial or airbrushed feel to the photo....

Hi Belinda,
This picture made me smile!
My first thought would be did you take the best scan you could? If this origional is 5X7 and I was scanning it to archive I would scan it at 600 PPI and save it as a TIFF. You will get a larg file size but if storage is a problem you can always save it to disk.
That said, I did pretty much what you suggested; I used curves to set the adjust the individual channels then set the grey balance. I made a copy and used multiply for the blend mode and then pulled a gradient across to help the exposure being darker on the right side. I used reduce noise, as my copy had horrible jpeg artifacts. Then sharpened slightly with the high pass filter.
You'll get better luck with the color on your larger origional. I suggest taking the image into the 16bit workspace before you begin your adjustments.

This may be the long way around to get these results but I am sort of a newbie with Photoshop also..

My Work flow:

Copied background, unchecked background eyeball.

Straightened image using ruler and then Image>rotate Canvas>Arbitrary

Inverted image used color dropper to get the color from the cement by the ladies calf (I figure it is supposed to be gray) inverted back to original.. new layer filled with the new color.. set layer to color at opacity 50%

select all, copy merged, paste (this combines the two layers into one .. you can uncheck the eyeballs on the other layers now

copied this new layer and set it to multiply
Copied this new multiplied layer

did a select all, copy merged, paste (this combines the three layers into one .. you can uncheck the eyeballs on the other layers now..

levels adjustment layer.. used the black dropper on the child's shoe.. white dropper in the sky.. gray dropper on cement by ladies calf

hue/saturation layer.. Saturation +33

did a select all, copy merged, paste (this combines the three layers into one .. you can uncheck the eyeballs on the other layers now..

Slight sharpen

Minor brightness/contrast adjustment (B=-5, C=-2)

Curves

Ran thru Neat Image to reduce a little noise

Hope it helps

Yea, it's a nice picture! For contrast, this is what you get with the automatic color, brightness, and hue adjustments in Paint Shop Pro 8, followed by the straightening function. What's really missings is the detail, and sadly, software can't bring that back. :(

Besides the usual, I applied neat image on the red channel & high pass filter on the green & blue. I also used the shadow /highlights adjustment, selectively boost the colors and I have taken the white point from the girls white sock (232) & the black point from under the teeth (23). To bring back the black contrast, I have taken the blue channel & blended it in using soft light set to 35%.

As the red channel was fairly damaged a created an alpha channel using calculations by mixing the much better green channel into the red channel using multiply. I copied the alpha channel into the red channel. Then using the channel mixer adjusted the colour, followed by colour balance

With a little more time burned the overbright areas and added a highpass overlay to bring out more detail

Hi Crzyfly1 yes I copied the original at 1200 dpi and as a Tiff, so I have quite a bit to work with I think.. thank you for suggesting the 16bit, that hadnt occurred to me.. :)

Granny thank you for so much detail - going to take me a while to work through it all!
(whew I have a lot to learn!)

Hallsey, thanks - its interesting to see work in Paint shop as I have never worked in it.. I am afraid you are right about the lack of detail.. it was a real 'happy snap' so not a lot of care in taking it ;)

Chillin thanks for the different way around it.. and I really like the greens so I will try that way too!

Cassidy thanks for so much hard work! I am amazed at home much data you were able to pick up, so I will work on getting that much from the orginal too.

Thank you all so much, this forum absolutely rocks (in case any of you were unaware ;) ) I cant believe how quickly you all responded and how much knowledge you have... I am off to experiment now :D

Belinda