Can anything be done with this

mafx · #1 07-10-2007, 06:07 AM

Hi all,

The image link is the only shot of my mums brother that anyone can find, there was a house fire many years ago and lots of items were lost.

Is there any sort of technique anyone can come up with that may be able to clean up this image to make it more viewable.

Many many thanks for any suggestions.

http://www.meshandfx.com.au/images/Vic_found_image.jpg

S.

DCobb · #2 07-10-2007, 11:14 AM

I see that the man in the center seems to be outlined--red marks. Are you talking about this one gentleman or the entire photo? Also, do you mean the physical cleaning of the print copy that you have or a restoration using Photoshop or one of the other programs? or both? The digital restoration of the entire photo would be rather time consuming as opposed to the single gentleman outlined in the photograph.

I took a try at this. First, I am not a retoucher and this is hardly an improvement. I think removing the background will help--a lot going on there. There are individuals here that can really work wonders. However, your scan is rather small making details difficult to work with.

Retouching begins with the scan. If you only want the gentleman that you have blocked out, you can just capture him alone during the scanning process. Also, depending on the scanning equipment, you might be able to reduce some of the damage.

dc

mafx · #3 07-10-2007, 01:56 PM

it will be just the guy but a slightly larger area.. the scan size I can't do anything about at the moment as that is all I have.

That was heaps more than I could come up with, what did you do to get that result?

DCobb · #4 07-10-2007, 02:46 PM

Hi Mafx-

Again, I am not a professional retoucher. I hope that perhaps some of those with more skill and experience might be able to give you suggestions.

I used the Dodge and Burn tool set either to to either highlights, midtones, or shadows depending on what I wanted to address. I also found that the blur tool set either to lighten or darken was helpful. The main probllem is getting rid of the texture in the picture without blurring it to death. Use anything that gets results by blurring and I feel that you will have problems with the small facial features. I guess the way around it is to do your blur work on one layer, add a layer mask and paint back the fine details without getting the texture back.

I would make an attempt to perhaps put in a slightly textured background with the layer set to a low opacity. Things like this are subjective. One person might want to retain as much of the original setting as possible, and the next person might want only the person with as little in the way of competing elements as possible.

I could not see enough of the facial features to really do much with them.

dc

unimatrix001 · #5 07-10-2007, 10:57 PM

I worked on the whole picture. duped layer added a small amount of gaussian blur about .9 duped the layer set mode to screen to lighten up a bit.
As for the scan, If you have the picture to rescan or if someone else scanned it for you they should turn off all enhancements in the scanner software. it looks like they have sharpening turned on and that could be the cause of the artifacts
in the picture. here is what i came up with