Any advice

[tawnidilly]

Hello, I need advice on how to proceed with the man in the photo. It looks like it maybe got wet and washed out the background and the man is rather blown out. I am cleaning up the tape marks and the tear. Just not sure if there is enough information to do a good restore.
Thank you in advance for any advice!!

[roger_ele]

I think there is enough detail for the man - it was hard to see because of the low res, I assume your version is high res and it is only the detail in terms of lightness in the man that you are concerned about. I did a quick and rough on the man's face to double check. Unless it is an illusion, I think he is wearing glasses and the image to the right of the crack needs to be shifted to the left a little.

Good luck - any questions feel free to wave.
~Roger

[tawnidilly]

Thank you Roger,
it looks great! Im not sure about glasses, I will ask the owner. Did you use the right eye to build the left eye? Im still working on the tape and tear and have not gotten to his face yet.
Thank you again,
Tawnidilly

[0lBaldy]

I like Rogers head fix!

A few Multiply layers with Gradient masks
painted suit
clone and heal scratches
(free) Polaroid dust and scratch filter layers (combine all layers.. copy twice.. polaroid D&S on top layer (light or dark setting)... hide all mask... paint white over spots.... merge down.... copy twice... do it again with the other setting
noise removal
try to fix mans face
Needs some artistic airbrushing (which I have a hard time with)

I think using your higher resolution WIP (Work In Progress) this is definitly salvagable

~~ EDIT ~~

Was not very happy with the first try so did another...

~~ first try ~~ ~~Second attempt

[roger_ele]

Tawnidilly, You are welcome! No right eye for left eye - just some quick cloning. Tips:

Clone a spot with the source from both sides of the damage to build a transition tone between the two good spots on each side of the damage and go in the direction of the shapes. Example - between the eye and the eyebrow is a strip of skin, set the clone tool on around 30% and make the brush size about the size of that strip of skin. alt-click the source to just to right of the black vertical mark and then click on the black vertical mark - now source to the left of the mark and click on the mark ... keep rocking back and forth until the damage disappears ... move to the next piece of damage and do the same thing.

Only work on damage that you can tell what that specific spot should look like. As you repair those spots other spots will present themselves to you as repairable because they are no longer obscured by the spots you just repaired.

Good Luck!
~Roger

[tawnidilly]

My head is spinning! Thank you OlBaldy and Roger! I will be working on it again this weekend. I will try to post what I have gotten done so far. Thanks again! I appreciate the help and advice!!

[Rikard Rodin]

I'm new on this forum, but have done a lot of restoration work in the past. Please email me a link to a high-res version of this and I'll see if I can help you out pro-bono.

[tawnidilly]

Rikard, I appreciate your offer, thank you, but I appreciate advice and suggestions. If you did the work for me, it would not be "my" restore and I would not feel good presenting it to my client as "my work." I would love to see some of your work and would like to see what you can achieve with my photos problem area. Thank you so much for the offer. That was very kind Here is a link to a full sized photo:http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z...mom69/8x10.jpg.
Tawnidilly

[Rikard Rodin]

Twandily, Understood. Having seen the high-res my first suggestion is to get this rescanned. There is more information in the original image that is being lost through a bad scan. When working on restorations it is always best to have a super high res scan--i.e., at the original size of the image scanned at 600 dpi. With a better scan, concentrate on handling the face. Start by layering up the image and using the multiply blend mode. Prevent the darks from getting too dark by masking the layers. You can also do curves or level layers and mask these to just the areas that are blown out. Those are my immediate suggestions. Good luck.