this is a scan photo of my grandfather, I know he had a mustache, I tried to clean up the picture as best as I can, I am a newbie at this but I can't seem to get his mustache look clear It a scan picture of a scan picture its all I have to work with. thank you in advance.

hi rosie,

i know you said this is all you have access to, but if you can get something closer to the original, or the original, it would probably be easier. also, it's normally better to scan in at least 8 bit color rather than gray. what you have is pretty pixelated/noisy and it's quite tough to separate out the definitions here.

however, it's not totally hopeless. i tried a number of things on it, median filter, polaroid dust and scratches filter, despeckle, jpg artifact removal, salt and pepper filter and so on. i did each of these as a separate layer, but not progressive one after the other. rather, i did one filter on a new layer and then turned that layer off and duplicated the original again and applied another filter to that duplicate. i stacked all these turned off layers on top of each other and from the bottom of the stack, closest to the background layer, i turned one on and set what appeared to be the best blend mode for that particular layer. i just kept doing that all the way up the stack. the results were... ok, but nothing great.

if i had to choose one action/filter that worked the best, i'd say the polaroid dust and scratch filter, using it on both light and dark specks and with adaptive filtering turned on on the dark layer.

you could also try airbrushing on a blank layer to essentially draw in the moustache based on available data. that might work better than anything.

what do you mean use a adapative filter with the polariod dust filter. I new to photo restoration. thank you

I used a plugin called "Noiseware" to get rid of the 20% Dot Gain

When scanning.. scan in color and at a high resolution with all the automatic corrections turned off

dots gone~Cropped

rosie, the 'adaptive filter' is just a setting within the polaroid D&S filter. you just checkmark it on or off.

thank you so much for all your help

you're welcome :)