Hello. This is my first post to your forum. I need some advice on the best way to restore this picture without making the happy couple look like a pair of clowns.

The picture was scanned from the original at 1200 dpi. It looks like a colour wash of some kind was applied to it, either by the photographer or someone at a later date. I had to clean it off before scanning as the brush or cloth marks were clearly visible. The damage done by the wash has left parts of the image with streaks etc which appear on all channels. If you reduce the opacity of the image by a couple of percent large areas of it disappear.

I have tried to restore it but I think I'm out of my depth on this one so any tips on the best way to do it would be much appreciated.

I have been following the threads about FFT and have tried Image Analyzer which does produce remarkable results on most images, cleaning up a lot of noise and scratches which would otherwise need a lot of work to remove so a big thumbs up for Image Analyzer and Meesoft for making it available to us.

Thanks

Peter

This is really a very nice picture. I think it would nice as a vignette and that would easily eliminate a lot of the noise.

I used the healing brush tool and cloned some. In addition I placed a blank layer and used overlay as the blending mode. To darken the light areas I brushed the light areas with white paint. And to darken brushed with black paint.

If you take the sluggard's way out, this is an extremely easy photo to restore. To get this version I just cropped off the streaked part. All that was left was to enhance the tone with a curve, spot heal out a few spots, and sharpen. I used high-pass sharpening. To tone down the groom's raccoon eyes I used a dodging curve masked for everything but the eyes.

for the vertical streaks/marks, i used mostly clone with some push (heavy smudge in photoshop). for the horizontals in the sky (somewhat light), i used airbrush, clone and push. for the borders, i used push held down with the shift key to get a continuous straight line. i also enhanced the trees with a bit of airbrushing and cloned out the heavy white part on the left where the wall is.

globally, i only used one clarify set to 2 (very light).

i did not bother to proportion the borders correctly, nor to put curved shaders in the corners. that would be optional, but somewhat traditional and there was some hint that some had been there at one time. some levels or curves could also be done to balance the brights down a bit, if desired.

great picture, btw. love the old ones like that.

Levels

Ran it through Imagenomic Noiseware a couple times using selections and masks

Painted on a soft light layer with white for his eyes and black for her cheek, plus a few other things

leveled and curves then Sharpened a little

Cropped and added the border

made a sepia version also

Thanks to everyone for giving me a lot of new things to try out and hopefully improve my Photoshopping.


Thanks

Peter