Removing 100 Year Old Texture

[charityk]

I asked my mother for photos to retouch.. and what do you know.. she sent them.

This picture is of my Great..Great..Great Aunts.. It was taken Circa 1888 +/- a year or two. It is on that heavy card paper with the almost "laid" texture to it. The biggest problem I am having is getting the texture out, so that the picture can be "crisper".

I have tried a number of things.. but to no avail.. If anyone would have suggestions I would be very appreciative.

Also, just as a side note, my mother scanned this photo well over 5 years ago. She doesn't have the original anymore as it belongs to my Great Aunt Ardella (who is 90 and has recently gone a bit nuts). So the odds of us getting ahold of the original again, to try different scanning methods are nil to none, unfortunatly..
Any Photoshop techniques would be VERY Helpful.

Thanks,
Charity

[BigAl]

I ran this thru Noise Ninja and then squashed it in PSP. Pity that you can't rescan it, as I'm assuming the original scan was saved as a jpeg??

[Doug Nelson]

I definitely wouldn't recommend this for most images, but on this one it would be OK if you spent more time on it than I did.

1. I duped the background and ran Dust and Scratches on it.
2. Then I duped the background again and used Blend If to lose all but the darkest values
3. Then I held down the Alt key while adding a layer mask to "hide all" of this Blend If layer
4. Then I painted white on the layer mask to bring back the details (well, some of the details, like I said, more time).

[Leah]

Do you have the full scan posted anywhere that you could post a link to? I think this is one of those cases where using the high-res version would be a big help...

[Vikki]

The best thing I've found for this type of problem is Neat Image (a free download plugin). If you play around with the settings, you can get a lot of the texture out without losing a lot of detail. I find that it works much better than anything you can do in Photoshop. It can still have a tendency to soften the image a bit, but I guess there's a trade off somewhere.
Here is an example (....I couldn't stop myself from coloring this once I had it open)

Also, many times, these images look a lot better when they're printed, than they do on screen.

[charityk]

Thank You Everyone! I really thought getting that texture out without the photo to rescan was going to be next to impossible.

Where would I go to find "Neat Image". Sounds like something I really need in my arsenal. (don't answer that.. just did a search and there it was..)

Vikki - that colored image is..well WOW.. Thanks for all your input.

Here is a link to the High Rez version
Kate and Emma


THANK YOU ALL AGAIN!!!