Beginner Wedding Photo Restoration

[BLR]

I'm a beginner Photoshop CS2 user. My mother asked me to copy some 1947 wedding snapshots for a family friend. I decided to try some restoration, too.

My approach, based on some examples I found on the Internet, was to scan at 600 dpi in color, straighten, crop, adjust levels, adjust highlights & shadows, use dust & scratches filter to create a dust & scratches mask layer, use cloning tool to fix major problems, unsharp mask, convert to grayscale, and print.

Please tell me how you would have approached it, how much time it would take, whether I'm on the right track, and what can be accomplished with more experience.

Thanks.

[DCobb]

I am not an expert at this. What I did notice was the bride's dress was washed out. I duplicated the layers and then I made a rough selection of the lightened area of the bride's dress and then made an adjustment and blended the layers together. I tried to smooth the skin texture by using the degrunge tutorial on this site. I, like you, will be interested to see the other approaches taken to resolve the problem. There is usually more than just one correct way to solve a problem.

dc

[solitear]

Hi BLR.......

It sounds like you've gotten and taken some good starting advice on retouching/restoration.........

As I was reading your post, my first thought was 'be sure to download Neat Image' since it's really good for reducing noise and the stand alone version is free......
www.neatimage.com

The second thing that I noticed is that you convert your image to grayscale .... so, I was wondering, if you've ever used any other method for converting to 'black and white'....... like changing your image mode from RGB to Lab then selecting the Lightness Channel then going back to Image > Mode > Grayscale and, once again, Image > Mode > RGB...... (just in case you want to colorize it later)

I'm submitting a 'down and dirty' very fast (2 minutes) rendition of your last image and the only thing I did was:

Ran the image thru Neat Image and saved it....
Opened it up in Photoshop
Image > Mode > Grayscale
Image > Mode > Duotone and selected one of the brown duotones
Image > Mode > RGB

Which is another method of creating a 'black and white'...... you may already know these methods and some of the others such as using Channel Mixer to convert to Black and White........ what these other methods do is give you more depth and contrast, etc.... and, besides, it can just look better......

I'd say you're on your way to doing a great job and what a fun project.....wedding pictures!!!

oxoox
Beth

Oops...... I forgot that my last step was to add some noise back in to the picture so that it didn't look too smooth.....