I am soooooooo sad can it be fixed :(

[JAYKAT]

This is photo of me and my daughter taking the mommy and me photos. I was going through photos and this one looks like there is windex spilled on it... I am working on trying to fix it and kind of at a loss....please any suggestions would be wonderful...

The first time I scanned it I did it as a tif, and it turned out black and white, and the second was saved as a jpg first. You can see more of the damages with the color

Cheers~

[Chain]

This looks absolutely doable.

1. Scan
Before doing anything, I would make sure to get the best possible scan:
* Make sure the scanner glass is nice and clean.
* Scan in colour (even if you would like the end result to be black & white).
* Scan at high/max resolution.
* Scan in 16-bit (might be called 48-bit).
* Turn of any automatic adjustments done by the scanner software (it might clip shadows/highlights).
* Save as TIFF/PSD/PNG (never at any point JPEG).
* Don't crop it too tight (more can be cropped later).

Now you have a digital "backup" of the image just in case we damage the original.

2. Clean up original, and new scan.
Now I would try and see if it possible to carefully clean up some dust and especially that blue spill on the physical image. I cannot give any specific suggestions to how. Anyone know any things that can be tried? Cleaning solutions that doesn't damage the photo?
If you get it cleaner – even just a little - do a new scan when done.

3. Cleanup in Photoshop.
The general cleanup can be mostly done using healing brush. Time consuming as usual with restoration.
The blue is more work to remove; you might have to pretty much reconstruct (clone/paint) over most of it. Hue/Saturation adjustment layer can be used to remove the blue hue. Curves adjustment layer is nice for fine-tuning brightness and color.
(Sorry for not being detailed here at the end; gotta run to a meeting! )

Edit: A layer in Color blend mode can be used to clone/paint color into the previously blue areas. Then you can use Curves to adjust the brightness.
Whatever you do, it will be manual labour, and include some trial and error to get a good result.

[Kraellin]

nice job, chain. say thank you, jaykat

[JAYKAT]

Wow Chain....that is a great job....!!!!! Thank you for the detail on how this was done...it really helps me learn...lol Kraellin....I was gonna say thank you but you beat me to the punch ... hehehe :_)

[Kraellin]

lol Kraellin....I was gonna say thank you but you beat me to the punch ... hehehe :_)

well, thank you for saying thank you