I'm definately not a retouch PRO - I do this as a hobby, mostly for my mother in law, who wants to put these old photos in a scrapbook.

I've attached two pictures. First is the original photo of my MIL's great-grandmother in Italy. Second is a close-up of some of the work I have done so far. I used some great tutorials on this site to help me take some of the more prominent smudges out of the background, and to de-speckle her face a bit.

Now my goal is to smooth out her hair without making it look too fake, and to make her shoulder and collar more prominent (on the left, it looks like her collar fades into the background). I also don't know how to fix the boy's boots - they look too faded.

You've made a good start! I think you've handled the damage on her forehead well. Hopefully others (Flora, T. Paul, etc.) will be by soon to offer ideas and assistance. I have trouble seeing where her collar ends and the damage to the background begins, so I'm not much help there. You can darken the boy's boots in a number of ways -- one would be to select them (use quick mask or the pen tool or the lasso) and add a blank layer above your working copy - then Edit --> Fill with black (don't know if you're using PShop, PSP, or Elements -- whatever it's called in your editing program to add color in an area). You are adding color to the selection on a separate layer so you don't have to worry about damaging the work you have done already, (and you can delete it if you don't like it). Then you can adjust the Layer Blend mode for the new layer to Overlay or Soft Light and adjust the opacity of that filled layer to make the boots look realistically darker.

It is a beautiful portrait! I'm sure you will enjoy the restoration of such a lovely image.

Hi, had a quick play with your images as follows.

Duplicated picture of girl with violin, set new layer to Multiply blend.
Applied hide all layer mask, then painted in shoulder line of girl, adjusted layer opacity to get required effect. Created new layer set to Soft Light blend, filled with 50% grey, then painted in darkness to hair using soft white brush 5%.
Finally ran picture through Neat Image.

For boys shoes, selected boys lower legs, and pasted to new layer. Ran levels correction on this layer, and applied graduated layer mask.
Cloned out a few blemishes and then ran it through Neat Image.

Both require further work, but this should give you a direction to go.

Total time taken for both, about 15-20 minutes.

Hope this helps.

Finally ran picture through Neat Image.


Alright, what is Neat Image? I saw it in a tutorial and I couldn't find it in PhotoShop.

Thank you both for your help so far!

Neat Image is a free standing or PS plug in noise reduction programme. Flora's got a link to a free version of it somewhere, if I find it I'll add it to this post.

Here it is.

www.neatimage.com/download.html

Hi
Had a little go at the Lady, still needs work.
Masked the hair and used levels to darken, used burn tool for shoulder.
Cheers
Chris

My humble effort in 7 minutes 35 seconds. Just jokin Gary! Good job!

Cheers
Dave

It's OK Dave, my shoulders are broad, and my skin is thick, I can take it. Personally I thought yours looked like a 7min 38sec job. Nice work, keep it up.