gr-gr-grandfather photo in horrible condition

[lamboe80]

I'm relatively new to restorations. I got some old photos from my mother and grandmother recently for some practice. My grandmother gave me an extremely damaged photo of her grandfather. I'm afraid it's way beyond my novice abilities. I wondered if someone could point me in some direction on where to start on this photo. There's not many places to clone from to remove the cracks. Is it even restorable? Thanks
The high res photo is at this link:
http://www.geocities.com/lamboe80/

[Xaran]

Try a levels adjustment layer - you will be surprised how much detail is really there. Certainly enough to do a restoration using cloning and the healing/patch tools.

Christine

[lamboe80]

Try a levels adjustment layer - you will be surprised how much detail is really there. Certainly enough to do a restoration using cloning and the healing/patch tools.

Christine

Thanks Christine. I did do that and saw a big improvement. Maybe I should forget about the background and just focus on him. That would eliminate a lot of work.

[Xaran]

That's the way to do it - you can always do the background later if you feel it would be worth it or just extract him and add a new bckground.

Christine

[lamboe80]

If anybody wants to work on this, feel free. I'd love to see other results. I've got a pretty good start on it. The face is really tough for me though.

[sdubose99]

You might also try scanning in color and choosing the best color channel to begin your restoration with. I find that many times red and green are completely blown out but there is good data left in blue -- more than is apparent at first.

Scott