Only Picture of Great Grandfather

[WTM]

My recently deceased aunt (she was the last of that generation) had a small 2" X 2" photo of a man we think is my great grandfather. He died in 1929 and family story is that he disowned my grandfather. I have scanned it at a high resolution but it is very blurry. I then rescanned at 300 dpi and played with it in photoshop (7) but still not much luck.

My goal is to try to get a clear head & shoulders image for our family history. Is this a lost cause?

Thanks for your interest.

[Vikki]

Many of us like to look in the different color channels to see if there is any extra detail, so if you could post a color scan of this, it would help.
Vikki

[WTM]

Vikki,

The original picture is black & white. When I scanned it in I believe it defaults to color unless I set the option to scan as black & white only. I also had to reduce the image in size to fit within the size limit of this forum .

I would be happy to rescan and repost if that will help.

Thanks
WTM

Many of us like to look in the different color channels to see if there is any extra detail, so if you could post a color scan of this, it would help.
Vikki

[Vikki]

This doesn't look like a typical color scan (even black & white images should be scanned in color).
It looks like you've done some work on this already?
For best results, post the original color scan. You can still resize it, but this will allow everyone to see if there's any hope for it.
Vikki

[WTM]

Will repost original tonight.

This doesn't look like a typical color scan (even black & white images should be scanned in color).
It looks like you've done some work on this already?
For best results, post the original color scan. You can still resize it, but this will allow everyone to see if there's any hope for it.
Vikki

[CJ Swartz]

WTM,

Hopefully when you scan in color, one of the RGB channels will have more detail. We can't manufacture details that are lost, but some people with painting talent are able to paint in details that look real or almost real. (I am NOT one of those people).

Rather than painting, PShop can enhance what detail is there, and one way is to use the Overlay blending mode -- making a duplicate layer of your working image, then using Overlay to blend the two layers. You can add an adjustment layer to paint in (or out) areas where you want a different effect. You can do this a number of times with duplicate layers and it gives the effect of sharpening the detail.

Here's a rough idea of what you can get using this (calling it "rough" means that it's okay for everyone to find things wrong with it because I can always say -- "Oh, I wasn't finished yet, and I was going to do that very thing NEXT!" You will be able to see that my version has a strange looking left eye (as we look at the image) -- I'm not sure if that's something that I did, or if it was there in the image. We'll find out soon.

[WTM]

Here is the rescanned image. It is in the original size. I have an Epson 3200 scanner which I set to professional mode, 300 dpi, 24-bit color with no color correction. Please let me know if I should repost this using different settings.

Thanks for all the help.

[Duv]

I feel I get a more realistic "look" by doing the following. Uncheck resample and change PPI to 170. Crop image as desired. This gives you a cropped size of about .85 inch x 1.4 inch. Increase image size by 10 to 20 percent. I think I stopped around 4 x 7. I painted a very thin line to define the mouth. Increased contrast with Curves then sharpened at 100/22/4.

Cheers
Duv