Am I any good at this?

[Suzanne]

Hello all. I'm in the beginning stages of launching a restoration/enhancement business in my off-hours, and am very happy to have found somewhere I can get (I hope) some unbiased opinions before I spend too much time/money at it. My family and friends rarely have any negative critiques, but what do they know?

I'm attaching an old photo of my husband's uncle, grandfather and father that had developed a severe case of jaundice. I'm particularly interested in suggestions for the skin tones; the photo was taken in such bright light that anything I tried looked unnatural, so in the end I kept it very muted. Too muted?

Any comments or suggestions will be appreciated.

Here's the original...

[Suzanne]

And here's my finished work.

[Doug Nelson]

I went backwards and started by looking at your finished work. I'd say your business will do fine

One thing: you've lost almost all the shadow detail (see the dark coat).

[tyeise]

I think you did good! In answer to your question - no, I didn't think you made the skintones too muted.

[ArtistColumbus]

Suzanne, I think you did a wonderful job on this restoration. The skin tones are fine with me, especially considering the circumstances. My only suggestion would be to straighten the picture a little. They're all leaning a little to the left.

Great job. Good luck with your business!

[LQQKER]

Suzanne,

Overall, not bad! You had a difficult photograph to work on.

Areas that you might consider improvement on is capturing more detail in the hat and coat, a little dark when compared with the original. Just a note . . . I noticed a lot of noise with the blue channel, you could probably copy the green and paste it into the blue if you don't mind the extra effort. You can then adjust the new channel with the channel mixer.

Many of the older budget camera's had a tendency to destort images a bit. The left side is crooked and the right side is straight . . . go figure. I'm into astronomy and the same applies to the old "budget" telescopes. Still, you'll see this frequently with old photographs, it's something you can fix, or if you're a purist, you can let it ride. Afterall, it's a restoration.

The door looks colorless, having the bricks bright seems to make this more obvious. A little color would look better.

The fellow on the right, the same would apply to his shoes.

Skin tones are reasonable.

Bottom line, you're doing fine. It's just one of those occupations/hobby that is a continuous learning process. If you enjoy doing it, you can only become better (Then a new version comes out).

[Suzanne]

Thanks so much everyone for your comments. I've done a little more work to try to improve on the things that were mentioned.

Doug & LQQKER - I've worked on bringing out more shadow detail as you suggested but I'm still not sure I've got it right; I used Color Range to select the shadows, then added a Curves adjustment layer to lighten them.

LQQKER, I went back to my original and tried replacing the blue channel as you suggested - what a difference! Wish I had done that before doing all the other work, but I'll know better next time. (Live and learn!) Making better use of the channels and channel mixer is definitely something I need practice with; from reading the workflows posted on the Challenges I've seen that they can be a lot more useful than I'd really realized. If anyone can point me to some good tutorials or books that deal well with channels I'd appreciate it also.

I decided not to mess with the distortion and crookedness issues because I do like to try to stay as close to the original as possible, especially since the problems were not TOO pronounced.

Here is the picture again with changes. Thanks again for all your input.

Suzanne

P.S. I know what you mean about a new version coming out - I'm still on Photoshop 6 and figure that at this point I might as well wait for 8 to come out.

[LQQKER]

Suzanne,

I think you've improved the photograph nicely.