RESTORATION & ENHANCING HELP NEEDED ASAP!!!

[Lisa Stefani]

Hello,

I am new to retouchpro.com as of today. I am an amateur in Photoshop CS and in desperate need of help!!! I am working on a project in restoring and enhancing a black and white photograph. My deadline is this coming Tuesday, 02/08/05. I do not have access to the original picture, only a copy. It is a photograph of my Grandmother and it is blurry. I'm trying to make my Grandmother stand out by making it a crisp and sharp image. I don't even know where to begin, big sigh. To me, it's like replacing a lemon with a lemon, because I do not have the original photo to work off of. HELP PLEASE, SMILE!!! Any help would be greatly appreciated,Thank you.....

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Lisa, had a quick play with your image as follows.

Ran image through Neat Image to reduce noise.
Duplicated Background layer, then Extracted woman from it.
Blurred background using Gaussian Blur.
Duplicated woman layer
Blurred lower woman layer.
Sharpened upper woman layer and applied layer mask. Painted out areas I did'nt want sharpened. Adjusted layer opacity.
Merged two woman layers.
Applied levels to merged woman layer to increase contrast.

Sounds a bit involved but total time taken to do and post about 15 mins.

[Legacy~Art]

Gary your work is very nicely done!

[Gary Richardson]

Thanks very much.

[Romany]

Hi
Had a little go,maybe overdone a tad.
Run Neat Image
Adjust Contrast
Digital Gem filter
Cheers
Chris

[Duv]

Well, here's the best I could do on the original and Gram's. On the original I tried to get some of Flora's facial contouring but failed miserably. It fun trying though!! Also had trouble with the chin.

Cheers
Dave

[Lisa Stefani]

Hi Gary,

Nice to meet you, smile. Thank you so much for getting back to me. Wow, you're all the way out in England. Another part of my heritage I have never known. May I ask what Neat Image is? What do you mean by extracted? Are you talking about duplicating or inversing? What areas did you not sharpen on the upper half of the image? You did an amazing job? Do any of you work for a studio? Thanks going to Romany and Duv too! I really appreciate your help and feedback, smile.

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Lisa, Neat Image is a noise reduction programme which is either a stand alone, or a plug in for Photoshop. There is a free version available. Sorry I don't have a link for it at this time, if you do a Google, it should'nt be hard to find.

What I mean by extracted is I used the extract filter in photoshop to remove the girl from the background. That's why I first duplicated the background layer, so that afterwards I had the background, then above it in the layer stack a layer with just the girl. If you're not using Photoshop, then select the girl using your prefered selection method, then invert selection and edit/cut to remove the background.

I then duplicated the girl layer, so now I had the following layers.

Girl 2
Girl 1
Background.

Background I blurred to about 2 pix Gaussian Blur.
Girl 1 I blurred to about 0.6 Gaussian Blur
Girl 2 I sharpened using USM, radius 0.8, amount 150.

Then I applied a hide all mask to sharpened layer. Using a soft white brush, I painted on the mask therefore sharpening mostly round the eyes, nose, mouth and edges of her hair and clothes.

Hope this helps you, good luck with your restore. If any more questions, drop me a PM.

[Romany]

Hi Lisa
Just had a little play around with color.
Chris

[Lisa Stefani]

Hey Gary,

Thanks so much for getting back to me. Yes, I am using Photoshop. I didn't know Neat Image was a plug-in, smile.

[Lisa Stefani]

Hey Chris,

Thanks! Wow, that looks great! I was going to use color but I'll probably do that later. I'm trying to learn the tools down pat.

[cspringer]

Here is another version. Denoised and then added some back.

[nansi]

Hi Lisa,
Here is my attempt
ran image through neat image
fixed eyes
adjust contrast
added some noise back
Hope you like it

[Flora]

Hi Lisa,

Welcome to RP!

I'm sure you noticed this already, I moved your post to its own Thread to make sure it would receive the necessary attention!!

You have had a lot of excellent responses to your request!!!

What a beautiful woman!!! Your Grandmother reminds me of a young Elisabeth Taylor!!!!!

I know your deadline was yesterday but I had a go at your picture anyway .... (just couldn't resist!!! )

Here is what I did:

• Cropped the picture
• Duplicated the background and run byRo JPEG Cleaner, blurring the High Pass step as not to have too hard edges. (the action can be downloaded here from our new Resources Section).
• Used Hue&Saturation tweaking Reds and Yellows only, to remove the yellowish spots.
• Merged visible (the action for merging 'visible' without losing the underlying 'steps' can be downloaded here.)
• Created a Shadows Mask, copied to its own Layer and run the Curves on it to adjust tone and contrast. (the action for creating a Shadow Maks can be downloaded here.)
• Created a luminosity Mask, copied to its own Layer and run Neat Image on it to further reduce the noise.. (the action for creating a Luminosity Maks can be downloaded here. Neat Image (can be downloaded free here ).
• Merged visible.
• Created 'my' usual variety of empty Layers ( Blendings: Lighten, Darken, Overlay, Multiply, Soft Light and Normal), and with a soft white/black or sampled colour brush (Opacity 10-30%), I carefully painted over the details I wanted to correct and enhance.
• Used the Blur Tool (Opacity 20-40%) to selectively blur parts of the picture.
• Starting from colour sampled from the picture, I used Hue&Sat for colouring the image lightly.
• Used USM to enhance Contrast and to lightly sharpen the image.
• Finally, created a very soft vignette to darken edges and corners, to make the girl 'pop' out more. (the action for darkening Edges and Corners can be downloaded here).