Old Yearbook photo

[tigerphoto]

I found this old yearbook photo of a friend of mine, who had given me support in the time need. I wanted to thank him by giving him a photo of when he was in law school. Unfortunately the photo wont print that well. Any help on restoring this old photo.

[Kraellin]

hi tiger,

the first thing i did was a bit of brightness/contrast. i followed this with a clarify filter. then, i went through his hair with an airbrush set to dark and sort of daubed in here and there to darken it up a bit more... give it some definition. i then went around the outside of the hair on the background and did the same thing only with a lighter brush to contrast the hair, again bringing in more definition. i also airbrushed the suit with various shades, trying to match the suit shades mostly. i then set the brush to dark and redefined some of the shadows here and there.

once i had done all that and now pretty much had the image defined, i ran a digital camera noise removal on it, set a bit higher than medium. too much of this and you get a blurry result, so keep it looking natural. my settings were around 60/30/14 and 70 / 10 on the bottom.

after noise removal it became mostly a let's smooth this out. for that, i used the push brush.

and at the very end, i used a shadows/midtones/highlights filter to get the shades mixed better.

all in all, about 30 to 40 minutes. et voila'!

[TommyO]

It seems Craig and I were toying with this at the same time. (I think you beat me by a minute or two... so I edited the post a bit.) I like what Craig has done, which shows the ability to pull available detail.

Luckily, there seems to be plenty of detail left in the facial area... just not much in the hair, background or clothing. I would think the normal methods, i.e. levels, a little denoise, a little sharpening would do fine there. In addition to Craig's ideas, the other areas may need a little something extra, i.e slight overlay of texture from another similar source.

[LonK]

The photo is too small to do much with, but I gave it a try nonetheless. A little of this, a little of that and...

[Gary]

Something like an old polaroid shot. Colored the B&W and then ran it through NIK Color Efex filters.

[valerism]

Originally Posted by LonK

The photo is too small to do much with, but I gave it a try nonetheless. A little of this, a little of that and...

Holy Pajamas! Thats nice!