I asked my mother for photos to retouch.. and what do you know.. she sent them.

This picture is of my Great..Great..Great Aunts.. It was taken Circa 1888 +/- a year or two. It is on that heavy card paper with the almost "laid" texture to it. The biggest problem I am having is getting the texture out, so that the picture can be "crisper".

I have tried a number of things.. but to no avail.. If anyone would have suggestions I would be very appreciative.

Also, just as a side note, my mother scanned this photo well over 5 years ago. She doesn't have the original anymore as it belongs to my Great Aunt Ardella (who is 90 and has recently gone a bit nuts). So the odds of us getting ahold of the original again, to try different scanning methods are nil to none, unfortunatly.. :bawling:
Any Photoshop techniques would be VERY Helpful.

Thanks,
Charity

I ran this thru Noise Ninja and then squashed it in PSP. Pity that you can't rescan it, as I'm assuming the original scan was saved as a jpeg??

I definitely wouldn't recommend this for most images, but on this one it would be OK if you spent more time on it than I did.


I duped the background and ran Dust and Scratches on it.
Then I duped the background again and used Blend If to lose all but the darkest values
Then I held down the Alt key while adding a layer mask to "hide all" of this Blend If layer
Then I painted white on the layer mask to bring back the details (well, some of the details, like I said, more time).

Do you have the full scan posted anywhere that you could post a link to? I think this is one of those cases where using the high-res version would be a big help...

The best thing I've found for this type of problem is Neat Image (a free download plugin). If you play around with the settings, you can get a lot of the texture out without losing a lot of detail. I find that it works much better than anything you can do in Photoshop. It can still have a tendency to soften the image a bit, but I guess there's a trade off somewhere.
Here is an example (....I couldn't stop myself from coloring this once I had it open)

Also, many times, these images look a lot better when they're printed, than they do on screen.

Thank You Everyone! I really thought getting that texture out without the photo to rescan was going to be next to impossible.

Where would I go to find "Neat Image". Sounds like something I really need in my arsenal. (don't answer that.. just did a search and there it was..)

Vikki - that colored image is..well WOW.. Thanks for all your input.

Here is a link to the High Rez version
Kate and Emma (http://www.multiink.com/Kate-Emma.jpg)


THANK YOU ALL AGAIN!!!