Happy New Year everyone,
Hoping that I can get some direction with the attached photo. It is from back in the day, and I am not even sure the photo was ever very good. I have worked it and sent through Neat Image, still had lots of noise and unable to distinguish facial features. I have used so many different methods trying to get the person's features I can't recall. I do know that when I tried to remove noise on each channel and adjust levels, it seemed to have lost the color balance and became quite unattractive LOL.

Thanks for any help on cleaning up these kinds of images.

Need to know if this is one that can be useful to the owner ever again. The car comes clean pretty good, but the person does not.

Image scanned at 600 resolution, on Epson RX680.

Need a little help - where are you guys??

hi,
just a novice but be a little patient... you didn't post untill late last night... and the really good guys are probably still at work.... other maybe working on your now... but having a hard time with it... figuring out the best meathod... so be patient....

i am looking at but i don't think my skill are good to get what you need

Need a little help - where are you guys??

Thank you JerryB,
Responses are usually so fast, I just wanted to make sure someone was looking at my latest venture :)

Scan again and turn off everything automatic.. no descreen, no auto contrast,color, etc ... and maybe the man will be clearer

I took a quick look at this photo and magnified it. There doesn't appear to be any distinguishable facial features at all. Maybe the photo was never good?

Did levels on RGB and channel mixer
combined with soft light layer

no healing cloning or anything.. just looking for detail

One can't tell from the photo posted. It's small and highly compressed.

Since you scanned at 600 dpi, can't you crop just the face and repost without compression?

Thanks

OlBaldy,
Could you please give me some more information on how you got the picture lighter, if I could do these steps to progress to this level on the cleaned up photo, it would make a lot of difference, thank you

When you want to post pictures that are badly damaged you need to save them in a compression less format and post them on another website because the forum's attached files have a size limit.

The first thing you should do in my opinion is look for the channel(s) that seems to have the less damage and start from there. There's the RGB channels but there's also other color modes you can look into for this.

From what you see you will probably need to decide if you want to work in color or if you're going to have to go grayscale (and possibly colorize later).

This tutorial "Restoring an old photograph" by cameraken has become the starting point for most of my projects:
http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=255

Used in conjunction with this tutorial "Enhancing Details In Unevenly Faded Pictures" by Flora:
http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=65

But like the other posters say.. rescan, and/or post as large as you can to another host site ..

You could post the larger version at ImageVenue.com (3Meg max, free) or pixentral.com (2Meg max, free) or photobucket.com (1 Meg max free,... 5 Meg PRO)-- then post a link here in this thread to the site that is hosting your larger version.

you should scan at your max optical resolution (DPI) supported by your scanner and downsample after, this increases the chance that you will be able to pick up faint details on the print