Newspaper Photo

[Don]

Can anything be done to a newspaper photo to make it look like a real photo.
This is a copy from a newspaper in the 1930's.
This is the only photo my client has of her grandfather.
Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks,

Don

[Jakaleena]

Welcome Don! Glad to have you here - and you are certainly starting off with a doosie of an image to fix...

The first thing I noticed when I downloaded it to see what could be done with it was that it is a Grayscale image.

Scanning to Grayscale, even with a b/w image, deprives you of the selection of channels available in a color image. Often, by examining the different channels you can find a more useable one where the damage is not as apparent.

I'd suggest always scanning to color. The image can always be desaturated later, and the channels are usually the very first thing to check when starting to work on an image.

Could you possibly re-scan in color and re-post?

[Don]

Here is the Newspaper Photo in RGB.

Thanks,

Don

[Jakaleena]

Well, there wasn't a huge difference in the channels, which seemed a bit strange. There's usually a marked difference. Maybe it has something to do with it being a news clipping...

Anyway, here's what I came up with.

1. Opened color version of image and duplicated. Switched duplicate image to CMYK

2. Replaced Blue channel in original with Black channel from CMYK and desaturated image

3. Duplicated BG layer and ran Rank Replace @ 6. Set layer to Lighten

4. Did Dust Spotting with the History brush (there's a tutorial for this) twice and finished off by smoothing very hard areas with the blur tool

5. Duplicated layer and ran High Pass. Set HP layer to Overlay.

6. Flattened, ran High Pass again and added some noise

Not polished or complete by any stretch of the imagination, but possibly a direction to head in...

[Don]

Thanks very much for all the help. Just changing the Blue Channel to the CMYK Black Channel helped very much.

Thanks again,

Don