I have a photo, circa 1970s, coloured, faded oval and the surface is gritty, scratched, pitted, non-existant in places, and grubby. I'm able to work on a high resolution scan image and I may be able to cut the work down by creating a horizontal oval rather than keep the vertical.

My thoughts were to pick away at the minute specks of damage using healing tool and trying to create a base of skin tone that I can use for air brushing. The damage is mainly green in colour and I'm not sure whether I should try some colour control prior to cleaning blemishes or continue as I have and cope with colours later. The general colours are very bland.

I did run Neat Image through and the resulting loss of detail wasn't worth any benefit.

May I ask how you would approach the restoration of this photo please?

Leah M

I am not a retoucher, but wanted to give it a try. I used the healing brush and the clonging tool set to about 25% give or take. The skin needs more smoothing for starters, but improved over the original. So much more can be done to refine the picture.

dc

I went back and did a little more work. The single picture is the results.

Not grand but interesting. It will never be pristine. I used CMYK mode to help with the color. I would add another original layer and work from there but this is where I'd begin.

Plan of attack....

1) Realize that you have been very lucky with this photo. All of the important parts are relatively intact - eyes, mouths, noses.
2) Don't waste time with the background - just do a new one.
3) Don't waste time with colours, there's nothing worth saving. Convert to greyscale, choose the best channels (Red and Green here) and use the channel mixer;
4) Use healing brush, or similar, for the skin;
5) Use clone for the hair;
6) Colourize (maybe)

Neat image will not help as this is not "noise" with some sort of overall characteristic, it's just random grunge.

Good luck! :bigthmb:

Rô

This was my quick attack:

Straightened image
Levels outside ring
levels inside ring to match outside ring
cropped to new oval (because of straightening)
Polaroid Dust and Scratch removal
masked back eyes , noses, lips, tie, hair
Healing brush with aligned UN-checked for all the little spots
Neat image default filter and sharpen (masked the boy so he wouldn't be sooo smooth also the hair)
Levels then curves

(BTW there was no painting on the faces that is the orig colors.. all done with the clone tool after the dust and scratch removal so it is not re-colored. I am sure that some of these artistic sorts on here could re-color this pic and it would look much better)

~Original~~Adjusted~

My sincere thanks to you all for your time and expertise. Collectively you have contributed to my renewed vision for this photo and I am about to start the project all over again.


Hopefully in a few days or so I'll post the finished image.

My thanks again, and best wishes to you all :)

Leah M

this is clone, mostly, for the spots and such. to begin, though, i masked out everything but her dress and did a color balance to match up with the original color showing through on the left. then clone on a blank layer.

to colorize i simply used a blank layer set to color blend and airbrushed each color on a separate layer and guassian blurred each. i then erased to tone it down.