I work on old postcards from the turn of the century. Some are often colored. This particular one was colored in bright red on the woman's dress, stockings and shoes. It has left a lot of damage. What would you suggest for making it better? I am what I would call a novitiate Photoshop, using CS3. The damage is in all the channels. I used the lighten/darken nudge technique by Katrin Eismann as well. Maybe a blur layer with a mask?

Thank you
Karen

Just wondering, is this the original or after retouching some. Most of the artifacts seem to be in her dress and they look like they are jpeg artifacts. So if this is the original a rescan and saving the file in Photoshop or Tiff might be the first step.

I did use levels on what you posted to increase the contrast more. That helped some. Copying the layer and using a blur filter with a layer mask may be the way to go as you suggested.

and if you scanned it as B&W i would rescan it as color

Thank you, Phil. This is the original scan but resized from 600 dpi to 300 dpi. I import scanned it from PS, so it is in PSD. I have done some corrections on the image including Neat Image but I did not post those corrections as they all helped with spotting, general jpeg artifacts, etc. but did nothing to the skirt. I was waiting to do the tonal adjustments when I moved the image to LAB format to do the colorization via Ed's method (see thread "Colorization"). I will try it now, however, and see if it helps the jpegs. Otherwise, I will go with the blur layer and the mask. It is a big leap for me to even to know to do the blur layer and mask and now I have a pro telling me that my thinking is correct! Yeah! Yesterday, I practiced and conquered the pen tool for selections and now this. Life is good :)

Karen

Thank you for the suggestion, but, yes, I scan everything in color :)

Karen

Thank you for the suggestion, but, yes, I scan everything in color :)

Karen

Just curious.. Where is all the red you stated was there?

Good catch :) Actually, I desaturated after scanning it and before posting. Here is the original. NOW I see what I should have done! I should have checked the channels before desaturating. There is no damage in the RED channel. Duh! Well, like I said, I am still learning. Thank you for helping me turn on the light bulb.

Karen

thats what i was getting at when i made my post.
i could tell you did something to the image because all the channels looked the identical.
but if the image from the first post was the original from a scanned image then each color channel would have different detail