Help with photo

[rubykate]

Hello. This is my second post. I need help with this photo. I scanned it and tried fixing it myself but I think I have blown the colors out too much and there is alot of grain. It is a picture of my brother who passed away and his friend who also just recently passed away. I'd like to make it a nice photo to be framed for my mother and the friend's mother.

How can I make the colors look better and "smooth" out the photo?

Thank you for your help.

http://1ofakindx4.com/retouch/koworiginal.jpg

http://1ofakindx4.com/retouch/kowretouch.jpg

[Mining Art]

Hello; Messed around for a few minutes. There is a lot of color info left in the photo. The graininess needs the most work. The small one is with a new background.

[mistermonday]

RubyKate, the first thing I would do is run a noise filter to reduce the noise. The Blue channel is in pretty bad shape which explains why the sky is yellow. I would do a levels adjust to raise the blue somewhat. Run a Shadow/Highlight adjustment to brighten the shadows and tone down the sky a bit. The sky is pretty well blown away so you might want to consider adding one in from another image.
Increase the Saturation on the weak colors.
There is a ton of dust specs on the image. Cleaning it before scanning would have helped, however, they may be stuck to the paper in which case you will need to spend some time with the clone tool and healing brush to clean up the important areas like the faces etc. Here is a sample of where I might take the image. (I did not do any work on the dust / dirt).
Regards, Murray

[Alison]

Hi Ruby,

You could end up with quite a nice image out of this if you put a bit more time and effort in than I did

[grannysdc]

I thought this was going to be a quickie.. BUT.. I first tried to work at the 1200 resolution and found out my equipment is like me... OLD N Slow.. so after a couple hours of waiting and waiting after each step I decided that I needed to reduced the resolution to 300 so I could run the FFT filter on it to get rid of the paper/linen texture and I just left it there for the rest of the processes which were just the basic things you do for a retouch as stated by the very competent folks above..

Like the others said it needs more work and as well as you have done with your retouch effort, I am confident you can get a nice picture to present to your family and friends.. Just take your time..

[rubykate]

Wow! You all did great! Each one captured something that brought back a memory...especially some of the colors - they were right on.

Looks like I'm going to need some Noise software (?) and some tutorials. The basic adjustments are all that I was brave enough to use. Hopefully, I can get some results like you all did.

Thank you very much!
Kelly

[lurch]

Took a crack at this one, paying attention only to color correction and noise reduction (after reducing the image to about 9 MB so the moves wouldn't take forever). I used Photoshop CS3 with a some exposure adjustment ahead of time in Adobe Camera Raw v. 4.2. Here's my approach:

In Camera Raw I set the white balance using the 'white' patches in the back boy's plaid shirt for a gray point and put in a little fill light to bring out the foreground. May have done a couple of other minor tweaks but these two were the main ones. The white balance adjustment took care of most of the needed color correction with one click.

After opening the image in Photoshop I duplicated the background and turned that new layer into a smart object; double-clicked it to edit it and converted the resulting .psb to Lab. I often use Noise Ninja but the computer I'm on now doesn't have it, so decided to wing it using only the noise reduction tools in CS3. So, in the Lab .psb file I ran Filter>Noise> Reduce Noise (strength 10, preserve details 0) on both the a and the b three times in succession; ran it once (strength 10, preserve details 20, I think) on the Lightness channel. Saved the edited .psb and returned to the main image, still RGB, which was now noticeably less noisy. Used a curve to tweak the dark point and that plaid patch neutral, and another curve to tweak skin tones. Finished off by desaturating the foggy background by about 70 points.

Hope this helps you along, rubykate. Granny has clued you in on FFT to get rid of the paper texture (thanks, Granny, for the heads-up on image size) and Murray has given you other approaches to color cast and noise removal. With patience cloning and healing out the copious dust and lint you should end up with a super restoration!

Carole

[chillin]

It's very noisy pic, there is a limit of how much noise could be eliminated without compromising details.

[rubykate]

Thanks Carole!

Wish me luck!

Kelly