How would you improve this picture?

[lorelei9]

(I had put this in the Retouch Section but someone suggested I would have better results here)

Hi all,

I'm currently using Paint Shop Pro XI (and hopefully switch to Photoshop soon) and have been practicing photo restorations and retouches in the hopes of providing this type of service in the county I live in (it's not a big one, about 35,000 people). Anyway, I'd appreciate anyone willing to take some time to show me how they would go about improving the attached picture. It would give me some ideas on how to do others similar to this one.

Thanks,

Tim

[DCobb]

In looking at the walls behind the couple, it reminded me of pictures that were displayed when windows was set at 256 colors instead of the maximum.

I am not a retoucher, but found this interesting. I tried a few things. On the wall behind the couple I selected it and filled with one of the colors and then added noise. One small portion of another wall I cloned. On the faces I tried a low strength (20) on the smudge tool. Also, did a little cloning, healing brush and smudging on one of the suits. I use CS3 and I am not familiar with the program you use. I am not an artist, but I feel that would be a useful skill to help correctly shade the faces--especially in reconstructing the nose and mouth area.

Someone will post a solution with the correct workflow and hopefully familiar with your program.

dc

[philbach]

Well my first thought would be to rescan the photo if you have it. Many of the artifacts appear to be blocky jpeg artifacts. So save the file as a tiff file when you scan it again. Then open the file and look at the individual rgb channels and select the channel with the least noise and distortion. Many times thats the red channel. Also when scanning if possible try to make the scan a little darker. After that a nice restoration should be much easier.

[jstar]

Note that this is a very WIP, but you might get some ideas what to do (hopefully) Most things are left without finish / cleanup, like the wall behind people and their clothes.