Please Provide Photoshop Advice for Family Picture

[BLR]

This is a bad copy of an old B/W photo of my mother and her brothers and sisters that I'd like to restore. I haven't found anyone in the remaining family who has the original. I scanned it in color, but didn't find very large differences between the color channels. I would greatly appreciate any step-by-step Photoshop advice you can offer. I probably am at a Photoshop beginner's level. Areas that particularly worry me are:
1. Increasing detail and removing spots from the woman's light colored dress
2. Reducing shadow on the face of the woman in the checkered dress
3. Cleaning and fixing the spotted, blown out sky

Thanks for your help.

Barry

[philbach]

Well the left side of the photo has less contrast than the right side. So to start with you can add a levels or curves adjustment layer and correct the luminosity on the left side and use the gradient tool on the mask to block out the right side.

There are no clouds in the sky so you can make a sky layer with a mask and aggressively blur the sky.

Finally work on the subjects with healing and clone tools.

[Kraellin]

the only way to get detail back into that dress would be to draw/paint it back in. too much 'blown out white' area, which means the photo was overexposed in that area.

re the woman on the right's face, it somewhat depends on how good your resolution is on your original scan. if it's very similar to what you posted, then again, you're going to have to do some painting/rebuilding. photos with strong shadows are underexposed and thus you just get a blob of data with no differences. photoshop cant rebuild or expose what's not there. so, rebuild.

and on the sky, cloning is a good way to go. you can also paint or smudge the bad spots out. you might also try the polaroid dust and scratch remover or photoshop's noise removal type filters and tools. i prefer cloning on items like this, but noise removal can also help.

[spotter]

try using shadows and hilights in the image/adjustments menu .Slide the sliders and see what helps.
You can sometimes get much more into it than you thought existed.
If you make a layer and adjust using that menu item,then make a new duplicate layer and do it again and maybe even again,each time adding a new layer and working on a specific area e.g shadow then whites then mid tones, you can use masking to keep the bits you want from each new layer and consolidate them into a best effort.
For the sky you can use dust and scratches in the noise menu and then mask back for the rest of the picture. I do these two techniques quite often .

[Gary]

Originally Posted by BLR

This is a bad copy of an old B/W photo of my mother and her brothers and sisters that I'd like to restore. I haven't found anyone in the remaining family who has the original. I scanned it in color, but didn't find very large differences between the color channels. I would greatly appreciate any step-by-step Photoshop advice you can offer. I probably am at a Photoshop beginner's level. Areas that particularly worry me are:
1. Increasing detail and removing spots from the woman's light colored dress
2. Reducing shadow on the face of the woman in the checkered dress
3. Cleaning and fixing the spotted, blown out sky

Thanks for your help.

Barry

Firstly, I made a quick selection of the subjects and copied them to a separate layer which now allows for changes to be made to the BG on its own. I applied a dark-to-light gradient to the BG on a new layer in multiply mode and adjusted the opacity so that the blemishes were covered but the buildings were still visible. I used the clone stamp and healing brush to repair any other flaws and the used the dodge tool on a separate layer to blend the dress of the girl on picture left. Color was added with curves and softened with the Power Retouche plug-in.

Cheers!

[tom60634]

I mainly concerned my edit to the dirt smudges and cracks thoughout the photo.

I cropped out a portion on the right side.

I duplicated the photo, to make a noise mask.

On the original photo I made a new layer which I used Photoshop's dust and scratches filter. I made a mask for this layer and then applied the noise mask which was made from the duplicate. I used curves to adjust the mask to help pinpoint its effect.

Posterization and pixalation prevented me from going further. With a full size copy of the original there is a possibility that the re-creation could be of better quality than the original.

[Kraellin]

that's really good, gary!

[BLR]

Thanks for the help, everyone. It's interesting to see how many ways there are to attack these kinds of problems.