Photo Restoration - - help with face restoration pls

Candace · #1 10-22-2006, 11:40 AM

Can anyone suggest a way to restore the face on this photo. It's very irregular and pixilated. When I enlarged it you can really see it. Thanks in advance.
Candace

bart_hickman · #2 10-22-2006, 11:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Candace

Can anyone suggest a way to restore the face on this photo. It's very irregular and pixilated. When I enlarged it you can really see it. Thanks in advance.
Candace

It's pixellated because it's so small (126x160 pixels). You need to scan it in at much higher resolution. For a 5x7 print, I'd recommend at least 1024x768. For help with repair here, posting a 640x480 sample is probably good enough.

Bart

Candace · #3 10-22-2006, 12:12 PM

Sorry about that........is this size better?
Candace

Juergen D · #4 10-22-2006, 05:38 PM

Candace,
There is not too much to work with. The noise / pixelation can be cleaned up some, but quite a few details are missing. I used a curves adjustment layer to tone things down and thereby got rid of a lot of noise. Then I selected certain parts of the face and darkened them (his left eye, left side of his mouth etc). Painted his right forehead, sampled from the other side. Finally, I ran the whole thing through Noiseware Community Edition.

Juergen

unimatrix001 · #5 10-22-2006, 07:10 PM

not perfect still needs some leveling out but its better.

JBurt · #6 10-22-2006, 09:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Candace

Can anyone suggest a way to restore the face on this photo. It's very irregular and pixilated. When I enlarged it you can really see it. Thanks in advance.
Candace

Old photos should have a certain amount of grain/noise.
Here's what I did:
Multiple layers and noise reduction. One layer lightened to bring out the details in the uniform. Blending of layers and judicious erasing of details on different layers to make them pop without sharpening. A small amount of cloning in the face to suggest detail. I increased the color depth and tried using levels in each color to bring out details in the face but there's not much there.

There is still a lot of work to do but time waste's for no one.

FYI: Scan at the highest resolution possible and save that as your original. You may as well save your image to post here at a resolution of 72-75 dpi. With the compression requirements of this site, you may actually be losing more info at 300dpi than 75 dpi.
http://jburtphotos.com/images/Clyde 2b.jpg

Liasson · #7 10-22-2006, 10:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Candace

Can anyone suggest a way to restore the face on this photo. It's very irregular and pixilated. When I enlarged it you can really see it. Thanks in advance.
Candace

I worked on your picture and made adjustments. This is my first post here in Retouchpro. Help!

bart_hickman · #8 10-23-2006, 12:41 AM

Well I grabbed his right eye, flipped it, did a high pass, then blended it with linear light. Did some levels adjustments to make the lightness match.

I grabbed a nose from another photo of mine and blended it similarly to the eye. For both, did some soft erasing to keep the transition smooth.

Ideally, you could find another photo of that person and put in the correct nose--I'm just guessing and may well have drastically altered his appearance to those that know him.

Used the photoshop noise reduction filter to reduce some of the grain.

Bart

Kraellin · #9 10-23-2006, 02:27 PM

i started with the nose and airbrushed in some shadow for definition where it was missing or poorly defined. i did more of this about the face as needed. lots of push here and there.

added red eye removal to rebuild the eyes. the eyes were a bit odd. from zoomed out they looked like they were facing the camera, but zoomed in i could see that they werent, so the re-build was a bit odd.

i also did a little digital camera noise removal and a tiny bit of usm.

i also selected the uniform and brightened it just a tad with color changer.

had to also go around the whole image and push out the jpg artifacts quite a bit.

oh, i also doubled the image size before starting on retouching.

edit: and looking at it now that it's posted, it looks as if it could stand some more artifact removing.

CathyH · #10 10-23-2006, 03:15 PM

Candace
I used an adjustment layer to darken the whole photo, so I could see more details.
then I just used the burn tool to bring out the features. I used them at a very low exposure 5% - 20%. I had to use the range - highlight and middtones.

klassylady25 · #11 10-23-2006, 03:32 PM

I just wanted to say HI to another Candace! <--- That's how I spelled it until I married and saw that SOMEONE had spelled it Candice... I'm still a CANDACE at heart!! LOL