Degraded family photo

[retouch pupil]

I have a photocopy of a long lost family photo. The image is precious and I
have attempted to restore it but with little luck. It goes from black to
white with the flesh tones almost totally eliminated. I need to be able to
restore the greyscale and gradation. Has anyone experience of the
restoration of images which are this far gone please?

The image is attached.

Thank you for your attention


Theo Utcast.

[G. Couch]

Wow...honestly, you are going into the realm of repainting an image rather than restoring. There is not a great deal you are going to be able to do with a photocopy. Getting rid of the yellowing is easy and you could probably clean it up a bit, but to restore this back to anything even resembling a photo, is going to require you to essentially invent the information. (repainting)

[catia]

Theo,

As Greg said, this image will require a lot of "inventing" to restore. However, here is a version that has been rotated, cropped, desaturated, and had some of the noise removed. The size of the posted image was small so there was a lot of jpeg artifacting in it. If you perform these steps on your original, you may wind up with something you can work with.

Catia

[Doug Nelson]

This is not a good solution, but it may point in the direction of a possible solution.

I duped the bg layer, applied gaussian blur to the bg layer, then set the blending mode of the dupe layer to screen. Then I flattened and made a dupe layer and applied multiply mode.

[Bob Walden]

Doug's solution

That was neat Doug. I'm going to save that one. Thanks!

Bob