polaroid must be fixed ~ pointers and help please?

[starrynight]

I was a member here a long time ago, but I can't remember my username so I had to start from scratch. I am pretty good at repairing photos, but I have never restored one like this before. The guy in the picture is about to have a ceremony in his honor and they are going to play a slideshow of him. This is the *only* picture his mom could find from this stage of his life, and it looks terrible! Can anything be done here? I'm so grateful to any pointers or offers to help with this. Thank you!

[Mysterious_Em]

I imagine the first thing you'll want to do is see if you can lighten it up and see if there's anything to work with there. I've never tried to restore a polaroid, so I'd probably have to toy around with it for awhile to be able to say. Good luck, though!

[starrynight]

I messed with it a little bit, then found some tutorials online that helped slightly, but I think this picture is unsaveable. I just need it to look better, not perfect.

I tried lightening it up as you suggested but it's just so dark ~ I still can't see the edges of a lot of things.

Is there any hope for this? It seems like when I fix one thing, I ruin something else!

Attached is

1) the original, lightened by duplicating layers and changing top layer mode to Screen
2) the original, lightened, layers and curves adjusted, dust and scratches filter applied

[T Paul]

Experiment with the shadows/highlight filter (image/adjustments/shadows/highlights). This will give you more control than the screen mode. You should be able to bring some of the detail back, but it doesn't appear that there is much to work with. Some tweaking with exposure (image/adjustments/exposure) might help too.

Best of luck!

[Mysterious_Em]

That second one is better than nothing, really. I toyed with it a bit, but didn't get a much better version the yours. It just doesn't seem like there's much to work with. But I've always had trouble working at 72 resolution. :P I'll take another stab at it if you'll upload a higher resolution version.

[chillin]

Originally Posted by Mysterious_Em

:P I'll take another stab at it if you'll upload a higher resolution version.

...ditto...

[Cupcake]

My Try with the Polaroid.

[philbach]

Well I used a curves adjustment layer to lighten up the dark areas and a color balance to add magenta and subtract green and finally neat image.