Blurred and faded photo help

[Aurora Graphix]

This photo has me completely stumped. How would I bring this back to life?

Any suggestions would be very appreciated.

Thanks,
Brad

[mistermonday]

Brad, Welcome to Retouch Pro!
Whatever processed the image over attenuated the contrast. A strong increase will bring back some life to the image. Remove some color noise. A hue / sat adj layer to move the skin color toward yellow will cool her down a bit. A small amount of sharpening is needed. There more that can be done to tweak it from here but those basic adjustments are necessary first. If you have PS, you can take care of much of the essentials by opening the image in Adobe Camera RAW.
Regards, Murray

[chillin]

After you do some adjustments, you could look at variations (Photoshop) to decide which direction to go.

[Aurora Graphix]

Thanks guys (and thanks for the welcome).

I was able to pull the cheerleader out as you guys did, but now the photo kind of looks fake like the cheerleader was placed in the photo rather than a real photo which it is.

So now I have to figure out a way to enhance the background as well. I don't expect anyone to do this for me as I need to learn, but some direction in a proper way to go about it is very very much appreciated.

You guys rock,
Brad

[mistermonday]

Brad, there is not a lot of nice stuff in the background. If you bring it out too much you will just draw the viewers eye away from the main subject and draw attention to background things that don't add much value. Still, if you want to do so, you really need to create a mask of the model and protect and isolate her while you work on the background.
Regards, Murray

[Aurora Graphix]

Yeah I was kinda thinking the same thing. I may just replace the background or perhaps completely blur it out or something.

Again, thanks for your time.
Brad

[0lBaldy]

There is lots of stuff in the background but it adds ambiance to the photo... If you cut the girl and change backgrounds you will have what you did not want in the first place... a pic that looks cut and pasted... to make the girl look more like she belongs in the picture get rid of the highlights in her hair and on top of the bent leg... bring the background up to the same contrast as the girl get rid of some annoying highlight spots do some selective sharpening and blurring.. all like Murray said with masked layers, and it will at least look a bit better

[lynn55]

I use magic wand tool for remove old background then add gradient.

[Cupcake]

Go to Bridge and open the file in Raw.
It will come right back.

[TommyO]

Aurora,
I like Cupcake's rendition, and think ACR provides the quickest starting point for you.

I thought the white part of her jacket/shirt was probably originally blown out a bit by the camera flash. There did not seem to be any recovery available. So, it had to be rebuilt a bit by hand. Although a quick repair, you get the idea. Just add a new empty layer, sample a bit of the brown surrounding the leather string'y things, and brush on with a very low (3%) opacity... work slowly. For additional emphasis between the small strings, increase the opacity and shrink the brush size to near 2-3 pixels. Again, go slow.

I also felt the hair was a little over emphasized by some lighting from the rear, making her look even more artificial. You can do something similar for it. There are numerous ways to do, not just the above. And certainly, a higher resolution image would help for us; your copy should do fine for you.

[beautifulcopper]

hmm, dats a pretty girl. Well, heres my version. I used a quickie method, without going too much into detail. I think it can look a lot better if more time were to be spent on it.
Currently, I 've used the equalize command, blending options , and did a bit of painting to hide the pixelation on her skin.

hope this helps, in someway

Btw, dis is my first post on retouchpro. weeheeee!

[secretagents]

I've had a quick go at it and despite the fact I have overdone the denoising a bit and also overblown the white part of the costume I think it's not too bad. With a bit more thought and some masking as to as to keep more details where they have gone lost I think nothing is imposible with this pic.

Btw I have done it all in PS 7 using HSL, Levels, Color Balance and the plugins Ximagic Denoiser and Xero Tweaker plus a bit of healing brush and smudge tool.