Help with a bad photo

[GerryB]

I have been asked by a friend of mine to restore this photo of a friend's Mother as a young girl. This is the only picture he has of her. I have done some restorations of old photos before but I'm in over my head with this one. The original is in TIFF format and is 2459 x 3184 with a resolution of 300ppi.
HELP!

[irshgrlkc]

I don't know that there's an easy fix for this but here is what I accomplished in ten minutes (obviously a much better job could be done). I've also attached my layer's pallete for reference.

1. Levels adjustment layer to brighten image
2. Ran De-Crack action at 0.7 (this can be found in the forums here if you search for it)
3. Ran Neat Image to gently remove some of the cracks (Any noise removal software will work, just do it gently.
4. Used the cloning & healing brush to get rid of major cracks and spots
5. Ran Neat Image again this time to try to get rido of the tecxture of the cracks (this removes detail)
6. Ran the high pass filter to bring back detail in face, set layer to overlay. Added a layer mask to to hide this layer and then painted the face detail back in.
7. Selected red of eyes and desaturated them

That's it. I'm sure you'll get other tips that are probably a lot better, I am definitely not a pro.

[Kraellin]

gerryb, welcome to RP.

kerry's is pretty good but a bit heavy on the Neat Image noise removal. this tends to blur things just a bit much. you can either do a sharpening of some sort to bring this back or go lighter on the NI. but her steps are good. and for a 10 minute job, quite well done.

i'd also do a color balance. things are a bit too red. and i'd do the cloning before the noise removal. if you noise remove first, you lose detail and this makes the cloning more difficult sometimes.

craig