old bike racing restoration

[carpman]

Hello, ok being attempting a restoration of picture of father racing in 1950's, i have done most of big stuff, rips, fold marks etc

Any ideas on how improve it now, i have tried noise reduction but it does not look good.

cheers

[philbach]

Well I believe I did improve the photo by running it through neat image and after that I copied the layer and used overlay blending mode and a high pass filter to sharpen it. So I blurred it and then sharpened it.

[TommyO]

I like what Phil has done. I would think anyone else would be pressed to get anything better. Sometimes, an older photo just looks good as an older photo.

From a restoration standpoint, I think it looks great. Anything else would simply be personal interpretation and starting to get into retouching. So, any additional changes or modifications to the original scene would up to you and your imagination.

Good job !

[DCobb]

I ran the picture through Focus Magic and applied it only to the cycle, not the background, did a degrunge on just the motorcycle body and a burn set to shadows to slightly enhance the 37. and a slight levels adjustment. A little difference. The original post looked very nice.

dc

[0lBaldy]

I thought I would give this a shot because I started riding in the 50s.

Did levels and curves on your restoration then ran it through full noise reduction in "Noiseware" twice, masking off the background first then only letting the front of the bike show the second time.
I like the grainy look in the background (Tis a personal thing because I am old and cut my teeth on grainy B&W Pics) Anyway, then I used the history brush and darkened the background a front of the track a bit. Finally, sharpened a tad.

A slightly larger version is here.

[Kraellin]

fun picture

i started with a shadows/midtones/highlights and then a digital camera noise removal. next was a clarify. all of these were done on separate layers, copying each layer forward and applying the next step on that new layer.

after this, i started cloning and pushing. the difference to this one with clone was that i did what amounted to quite a bit of clone painting. this is where you use the clone brush as a paint brush. instead of dabbing each clone action one by one, i used continuous strokes at a very light opacity, going all the way down to about 10. this was done on the ground and on the front and side of the motorcycle.

after that it was mostly push to smooth a few artifacts and such, set at about 30 opacity.

[carpman]

Thanks for ideas, i will try them out and let you know what i come up with.

[Heretic]

i agree with TommyO, sometimes an old photo looks best as an old photo.