Help - Need to tidy up old photo

[Rich-uk]

Hi,

I need to make this picture of my grandmother look as good as possible as it's going to be put on her gravestone, I scanned the original at 1200dpi and have reduced it in Photoshop. As you can see, the quality is about as bad as it gets. Is there any way to make the picture any better?

It seems to be a bit better if you add a blue tint to it, but I thought I'd post the original in case anyone actually knew what they were doing

Thanks

[DaveS]

Hi Rich-UK,
yes there are a great many people on this site who do know what they are doing and are only too willing to help people like you and me who struggle a bit trying to improve seemingly impossible images. I've been lurking around the fringes of this site and have found the vast knowledge and skill that is here very informative, so I have at last tried to put something back in, hope you like my attemp, unfortunately the hair seems to have become a little posterised due to the amount of manipulation.
Level adjustment set blend to multiply
Hue/Saturation adjustment
Colour Balance
Saved the image then oipened it in Neat image to tidy the noise up a bit
re-opened in Photoshop, sharpened using High Pass to accentuate the face and finally a curves adjustment set to screen to brighten it up.

[Flora]

Hi Rich-uk,

Welcome to RP!

I'm not really satisfied with the result I got .... but here it is ....

I used Levels, Curves and Brightness&Contrast to improve on tone and contrast.
Selective Colors to correct the colour.
Neat Image to minimize the noise.
High Pass Filter for sharpening.

[vinniesworld]

Here's my attempt:
1. Adjusted levels on each channel
2. Adjusted variations
3. Neat image
4. Polaroid Dust and Scratchs
5. Unsharp mask 10/50 for contrast
6. Highpass filter to sharpen
7. Empty layer, brush in shadows-6% overlay mode.

@Flora: Great job as we all have come to expect.

[jonk]

Here's Mine:

I did the following:

1. Rebuilt the Green channel with 75% of the Blue channel
2. Rebuilt the Red channel with 50% of the Green channel
3. Replace the Blue channel with 100% lighten Green channel
4. Converted the image to Lab selecting the Lightness Channel and then converted the image to Grey with the Lightness channel selected.
5. Color corrected the image.
6. Unsharp Mask 80/2/3 settings
7. Cleaned up with Clone and Healing brushes
8. Replaced bad spot on right shoulder
9. Added a flower to the left shoulder replacing the partial one there and the person’s head. Yeah – I know the perspective is not correct on the flower; it’s there for an example.
10. Finally I extracted the lady from the background and replaced with one of my own.

I did a lot of small tweaking as I went along with various adjustment layers.

Oh Yea - I also played with Neat Image to see if I could improve the focus, but no luck.

I think that if you did a high-res scan you would be able to restore a lot on this photo. The only problem you are going to have is it is out of focus. You will need to play around with different techniques to see what works best for you.

Good Luck and I hope that this helped!

Jon

[Rich-uk]

Thankyou very much, and on my first post too!

I don't know what to say