Restoring surface damaged photograph - can it be done without losing detail?

[Jack Frost]

This is the only photograph extant of my Great-Grandmother who was herself the Great-Granddaughter of a very politically prominent man during the U.S. Revolutionary War.

I’m having all kinds of trouble with trying to restore it as I am a beginner. I’m having an especially difficult time trying to remove all the surface damage cause by years of mishandling and fungi growth WITHOUT losing print detail. I am most interested in smoothing the skin tone.

All the blur tools including scratch and dust removal cause an unacceptable loss of detail in this already soft image. I have tried blurs, layering, different opacity settings with the eraser tool and I really don’t know how to resolve this problem or if it is resolvable. Any advice about this image would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks,
Jack

[Jack Frost]

I wish I could post something with higher resolution.

[mistermonday]

Jack, use of a noise filter like Noiseware, Noise Ninja, or Neat Image will get rid of a lot of the fine noise. The rest you can brush over or clone.
Attached is a quick pass through Noiseware and then a quick paint brush around the background. You could do better on a higher res image. If you wish to post one, upload it to www.imageshack.us then copy the very last link of all of the links they give you, and paste it into this thread.
Regards, Murray

[DCobb]

I wanted to take a try at this. Selected the green chan and then converted to grayscale. Took out the big areas using the patch tool. Then selected the green chan and converted to grayscale. Used degrunge on the skin and the blur tool on the background. Converted back to RGB and took a blank layer set to color. Selected the hair color from original pic and painted it in. I also ran the picture through Focus Magic to give it a little sharper focus. I do have Neat Image Pro, but wanted to see what I could get using these steps.

dc

[Jack Frost]

Thanks Dcobb and Murray.

That's some great work you do. I'm excited that I may be able to recover the photo now.

Murray, I've took your advice and tried to post a larger photo on imageshack.us but for some reason it would not take it.

I was checking out noise Ninja and Neat Image and ran across a program called Portrature by Imagenomic. I downloaded a trial version and it seems very promising.


Cheers for now,
Jack

[mistermonday]

Jack, check out Noiseware by Imagenomic. It is the best of the bunch of noise reduction products. As for the ImageShack, I think they have a limit of between 1MB and 2 MB file size.
Regards, Murray

[Jack Frost]

Yeah, their size limit is kinda small. Given that, I don't know if this will be much of an improvement.

[img=http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/2107/img0652hc2.th.png]

[Gary Richardson]

Had a quick play about with your image, bit late here so if you want details let me know and I'll post them later.

[Peter S]

The bigger image is still rather small, I gave it a go.
A pass through Imagenomic noiseware. A trip into Lucis to bring out the detail a bit. Another pass through noiseware, then healing brush on the remaining flaws.
Not complete but I think on the way.

Peter

[Jack Frost]

Hello again,

Thanks for all the attention to my G-Grandmother's portrait. I never knew her but she was an important figure in my mother's life.

I found the degrunge tutorial but I can't seem to get it right. Has a photoshop action been recorded to do this? I don't have a very good eye for the amount of blur to use.

[Panpan]

This is a low contrast, low dynamic range picture where we see only her eyes, nose and mouth. I tried to paint in a little modeling to the face.

[crazyfly1]

That was fun. Can't even tell you what Idid, Iworked on it fora couple hours trying to save the detail and soften the face. I know there masks o'plenty. Anyway I had fun, hope you like it.