Help with old photo

[mepaulus]

Can anyone offer any advice on how to bring out more detail on this photo of a friends parents i,m working on.I used adjustment layers of levels , colour , brightness and hue/saturation to get it to this level before starting on the cleaning up process but would like a bit more detail if that is possible.Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

[Steve13]

Just an experiment... it's way oversharpened, but has more detail.
Levels
copy layer/hard light/filter/other/hipass about 26
flatten
Image/adjustments/color balance
Image/adjustments/hue-sat
Ran another hipass filter.

[TommyO]

Unfortunately, not really. The image was out of focus and the flash washed out some of the facial features and the eyes. It will require some artistic work to make it look any better than you have already done.

[crazyfly1]

I used the clarity function in lightroom. In photoshop I used unsharp mask at a high radius (60) and a low strength. Twice. On the second pass I used a layer and cut it out over the eyes on all three as it was getting too intense. That and I cut out most of the red channel with a luminocity layer.
Oh, and did the incredible huge, really really a lot of distortion bug anyone else??

[mepaulus]

Many thanks for all who replied.I did some more sharpening on duplicated layers and used the detail to repair what i could.Use of donated features from the web helped me reconstruct some parts (mums mouth and sisters eyes and glasses) and with use of eraser and soft filters heres the result.My friend is over the moon and says the features are all just perfect (hopefully not being just thankful lol).

[Steve13]

Yeah, I noticed the distortion. I thought it looked like a re-photo.

[TommyO]

That is a very good job, considering what you had to work with. Excellent.

[mepaulus]

Originally Posted by TommyO

That is a very good job, considering what you had to work with. Excellent.

Many thanks for the encouragement Tommy , i would,nt have been able to do it without the excellent tips and other skills i have gathered from other posts on here.I have only been working with photos for a few weeks , i primarily bought photoshop to help my wife to make virtual clothes and skins for the 3D world "second life".I am a full time truck driver and so do,nt get as much time as i would like to practise with photoshop but since joining this forum have learnt so much in a very short space of time.

[mepaulus]

A quick heads up on that photo , my friend came over and brought the original pic, what a difference a scan makes so i had another go , I also placed the subjects in the centre and straightend the door because the angle of the camera had changed , heres the before and after.

[crazyfly1]

Wow!

[mepaulus]

Originally Posted by crazyfly1

Wow!

LOL , thanks crazyfly ,as you can see in my original post i thought he was wearing a red jumper with bad stains on the photo but when i got the actual photo and scanned it i saw it was a leather jacket with a red stain on the arm.i maybe overdid it a bit with the neatimage on the faces as i seem to to do a lot but with experience i,ll get the feel i,m sure.

[socai]

hellok kk kuk u kuk ukuk u