Back With New 1920's Photo

[VCOOPER]

Asking for help with ideas or to know if this picture can even be restored. This is my friend's great grandmother. Scanned picture in at 600 then converted it to Gray scale. I think that pic is a blow up of a xerox copy as when it is put into actual pixel size, there appears to be no actual pigmentation, but color blotches. Is this one that is not restorable. One eye appears like a cat, while the other eye is there when I look very hard.

I just cannot figure out where to start and work from on the pic since so much of it seems to be gone.

I can't seem to see where there is any of the original picture to work on. I would love input on this pic.

Thanks

[mistermonday]

By converting the image to grayscale you may have removed valuable detail which was present in the color scan. I suggest that you post the original color scan so that folks can make the best assessment of it.
Regards, Murray

[VCOOPER]

good morning,
thanks for looking at the picture, however, I did post the exact scan. It is RGB, but the image itself was the color you see.
Verneatha

[Kraellin]

ok, this is just to get you going. yes, this can be helped. but, it's going to take some work.

to start, we want to find the image a bit and maybe do some cleanup in the process. here's how i progressed. this is NOT finished. this is just the easy part.

1. duplicate background

2. clarify at a setting of 2 on duplicate.

3. duplicate that.

4. usm at 10/100/5

5. duplicate that.

6. digital camera noise removal. i didnt do a full setting here. i just wanted to clean up part of it without overly blurring things. Neat Image would work here too.

7. duplicate that layer.

8. normally, i wouldnt do this next thing but because this is just an example i took a shortcut here. i resized the image downward so i could use the Polaroid dust and scratch remover within paint shop pro. anything over 800 pixels on a side and you have to use it in stand-alone mode. so, i just cheated a bit here.

8a. removed for black specs.

8b. duplicated that layer.

8c. removed for white specs. again, on both the black and white spec removal, i dont want to do a full filtering to effect too much blurring.

9. duplicate to new layer.

10. paint shop pro has a really nice feature for putting eyes back in an image. it's their red eye removal tool. i could have done this by hand, but in this image the eyes were pretty messed up so i just rebuilt them. also, i shld have resized the image back up to the original size here, but forgot and did it afterwards. it would have given me a slightly better look had i done so.

11. resized back to original size.

so, you may look at what i post here and go, well, that's not all that good. like i said, that was the easy part. the next part would be clone, airbrush, and push (smudge) to put back more of the detail and remove more of the damage and that could take hours.

so, that's one way to go to get started