Damaged image from a dying digital camera

[Filippo]

Hi everyone,
please excuse me for my english, it's not my native language.
We took this picture with a cheap kodak compact camera, which is starting to sometimes spoil the pictures as shown on this one, hence I think it's about to die on us.
We have another canon digital camera but is not available to us at this moment, so we're stuck at using this one till January.
I would like to ask you experts some questions:
1) Do you think such image coluld be repaired somehow?
2) If yes, could you point me to some tutorial/info on what should I do, considering I have only the gimp at my disposal?
3) If anyone want to try to restore the original image, it's about 1Mb in size, but forum limits impose 100Kb max - how do I upload the entire original image?

Thanks,

Filippo,
Italy

[jeremy1986]

You could always uploaded to an image-hosting site such as Image Shack or Photobucket. I believe that this photo can be repaired because you can still make out the detail of the image.

[Kraellin]

this could be helped, but it's not going to be great to do so. the eyes would have to be rebuilt and i know of no filter that would remove all those little stretch lines. those would have to be done by hand. if this is a fairly recent picture of the boy i'd wait till you got the better camera back and take another picture of him with that. but, a bit of clone and push/smudge, then yes, it can be helped.

[chillin]

It needs a lot of reconstruction work (missing details).

[jesterjeni]

this is very do-able but I agree you need a new camera

[chinchillakilla]

This picture can be saved but for sensitive areas like the eyes I suggest if possible getting a second picture of the boy and using the eyes from that picture as for the rest all the features are distinguishable so can be restored. This will not take 5 mins to fix but with use of spot healing tool, clone tool and even the smudge tool and a few adjustments you can get this to a pretty decent standard.

[Filippo]

Hi, thank you all for the replies, jesterjeni and chillin tries are already amazing.
I downloaded a python library (I'm a programmer) called Python Imaging Library (http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/) and I was planning to build a program to selectively shift up or down vertical rows of pixels, in the hope it would make it better.
Just out of curiosity, how did you restore the eye part (the name of the tool used) ?

Thanks, Filippo