Is there any hope for this photo??!!!

[nichiv]

Hi guys!!!

I have been working on our family tree and found someone with a couple of really old pics- one of which is of my hubbie's great grandparents. This photo was taken in the early 1900's and honestly- I don't know where to begin or if there is anywhere to begin,lol! If anyone can help- please let me know how you fixed this- I am still early in the learning process with really old pics. Thanks so much in advance!!

Nichole

[mistermonday]

Hi Nichole,
The image you uploaded appears to have been saved at the lowest possible jpg quality (0 or 1). The image is severely pixelated into a buch of solid blocks. For upload purposes I would suggest that you crop out all of the background except the active photo area and resize the image down by about 20% and save at 72 dpi instead of 150. Needless to say it does not make sense for anyone to work on the sample you attached.

That being stated, there is probably a lot of improvement possible for the photo assuming you have a good high resolution scan.
The image is faded and weak. So to begin your restoration I would duplicate the background and optimize the contrast of each channel individually to pull the maximum detail out of every channel. After doing that, the color of that new layer will likely look pretty ugly. However, if you change the blend mode to luminosity, the color of the background layer will be restored to what you started with.

From there you will need to correct the color or convert to black & white and proceed to repair the key damaged areas.

Regards, Murray

[nichiv]

Thanks for your reply!

This photo was e-mailed to me by another researcher- I had a close up on it too and could see that it was severely pixelated. I will give your suggestions a try and see how far I get...

Thanks again!

Nichole

[philbach]

Yeah the place to start would be to get a better scan. With the posted photo I started. First I looked at it in RGB mode channel by Channel and the best channel seemed to be the red channel. So to the photo I used a channel mixer adjustment layer used monochrome and 100% red. Then after that was done I applied levels.

You can see how badly pixelated the photo is and so a better scan is mandatory. I know you got the photo via e-mail but if you were working on this with your scanner its a good idea to scan using photoshop or Tiff as your file type.

Of course this is a start. The next step would be so smooth out pixel blocks via blurring, cloning, painting etc.