Vintage Horse Show Photo

[Stormchaser]

Hello everyone. I was given this photo from a friend to see what I could do with it as far bringing back a little life into it. I thought you guys might want to play with it a little as well. I'm still learning on photo restoration so bear with me.

The hardest part to me is going to try and bring that horse out of the dirt since they are so close in color. I don't think there is much hope for facial detail and I'm not even sure how dark the audience was supposed to be due to the flash.

The first pic is the original. The second one is my take on it so far. I just messed with getting the orange off and cloned off some of the specs. Any advice you have would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[0lBaldy]

The first thing I did was get a good levels adjustment
I then tried the Deconvolution filter to try to separate the horse from the ground (minimal success)
Used Imagenomic noise removal, Polaroid Scratch and dust removal (Just the light setting - masked), and Neat Image noise removal
Darkened audience with a masked multiply layer
Then on a combine all copy used the History brush set at multiply for the edges and corners
Then selected everything but the horse and rider and reduced the red level a bit

Forgot my manners...

Stormchaser, Welcome to RetouchPRO! , Good luck and enjoy your time here. , I hope you will make many new friends and enjoy your visits here!

Have you been to Leavenworth?

[Stormchaser]

Thank you so much for the warm welcome! I hope I do too.

I have been through Levenworth but have never really stopped. I studied criminal law in college and always wanted to go through their prison. Sounds kinda weird as I type this. LOL! Have you been there?

Thanks for taking a stab at this one. Yours is sooo much better than what I have done! I really like the color adjustment. I'm going to work on mine some more and see what I can come up with and I will post again here in a bit.

I have never heard of a deconvolution filter? Sounds like it could be very helpful.