Restoring old photo 1930

[grahamdcp]

I had a photo scan email to me from a relation who lives overseas. I have been asked can I touch it up and make it look nice.
I use PS 7 and PS CS , I am self taught from what I have read in tutorials so Doing the basics is Fine

But I am hoping that some of you more experienced users of PS maybe able to Assist me with some tips or examples to Progress Further.
Any help is sincerely appreciated
kindest Regards Graham.

This first image is the original.
The second photo is as far as i have been able to progress to

[pjstaley]

Purchase a copy of Grain Surgery. That will smooth out the graininess considerably. After that is completed, I'd desaturate, fix the scratches and tears with the clone/healing tools, then colorize. One very superb site for tutorials you might want to check is goodtutorials.com. Very diverse on PS capabilities. Any of Katrin Eismann's books will be tremendously helpful. www.digitalretouch.org. Also, look at this: http://www.kirupa.com/motiongraphics/colorization.htm

good luck

PJ

[grahamdcp]

Thanks for the advice and the links PJ, I will chase up a copy of Grain Surgery,
Basically what you have suggested using clone and healing brush I have done to a degree. But what I did next was used Auto color level which removed the tint then used history brush to paste the tint back in to color the dress and top and hat.
I suspect the original Photo was BW then bleached to remove the silver for longevity Tinted and hand painted to give some color to the image.

I will have a try at desaturating the image first,then doing the clone and healing tools.
the next step of adding color is what I need to learn more about so I will use the links you supplied.
Many Thanks.
Kindest regards Graham

[smats]

I think there's a lot of different approaches.
I would first inspect the different channels and choose one or a blend of maybe two channels. Often the blue channel is degraded more than the red and green channel.
Secondly, if there is any peridic noise in the picture I would use a fourier transform. See tutorial on this site.
Then go on with retouching and other filtering.
In this example i have chose the green channel and used a fourier transform and filtered the transform. No other actions.

[grahamdcp]

wow, you got rid of the horrible vertical lines .I will follow up on this method a little later as I have go now, a new day is calling many chores to be done .. But i really appreciate the advice. I will be back online later today . Thankyou

[Flora]

Hi Graham,

Welcome to RP!

As Smats already mentioned, to minimize the lines I used the FFT Filter (can be downloaded free here, and here is ByRo excellent Tutorial on how to use it) ... after which, to minimize the noise, I used Neat Image, a free noise removing program which can be downloaded here... In their 'How to use' section you'll find all the necessary information and in their 'Examples' section you can see what it can do ...

[grahamdcp]

PJ, Smats and Flora, Thankyou so Much...
Firstly PJ the information in the second link was very good.
Secondly Smats I love the idea of tackling the vertical lines through channels.
and finally Flora I am about to download the FFT Filter and have a read up on how to use it.
Also I will go and download neat image.
Upto now I have been using another method to remove noise but mainly color noise. I go into lab color mode and then adjust either colors by saturation hue /smart blur or gausian blur then revert the image back to rgb mode .

I had a try earlier with colorizing the image and I dont mind some graininess as I want to keep an antique feel about the image.
But all of you have been great and it has now given me some great ways to tackle the image. Thankyou once again.
Kindest regards Graham

[smats]

Actually it was the use of FFT (fast fourier transform) that I used to get rid of the lines. I think the lines are clearly visible in all channels.

Regards Mats