Old Color Photo with Serious Damage

[Ezad]

I don't know if a 100kb file is enough area to expand and view.
I work exclusively in Photoshop CS4 and have retouch/restore skills.
This is is a real challenge ... the women in the middle once expanded is severely speckled - and I have no idea how to reclaim her face ...and the women to the left the her arm and how it is supported by the dress (as background) offers another challenge. Considering Photoshop tools I get around with masking, healing tools, clone and so forth - however the severely speckling on many areas I can at an impasse. Thanks for any tips on this photograph taken decades ago in El Salvador.

[Mike Needham]

Re: Old Color Photo with Serious Damage

You could use a free image hosting program like www.tinypic.com to be able to show a larger example to help illustrate your point.

Oh and welcome to the forum

[Ezad]

Re: Old Color Photo with Serious Damage

If I did this correctly try this:

http://i60.tinypic.com/2qv70oj.jpg

and thanks for this super tip!

[Vernon]

Re: Old Color Photo with Serious Damage

Restoration is not my strong suit but I had a look anyway.

There seems to be a lot of physical damage, or other distortion that will be difficult to restore, including the speckling over the face.

I sampled the color of the silvering and created a layer above the image then set it to subtract, then adjusted opacity until the blue specs disappeared.

However that still leaves the speckles present across a majority of the image.

That, unfortunately is beyond my skill set for rebuilding missing color/texture information. At that point it becomes your choice of cloning from other parts to rebuild the missing sections (i.e.: the woman's arm/shoulder area, dress, etc)

To help bring back some of the detail in the woman's face, try applying a highpass filter on a duplicate of the image layer, set it to linear light, then using a mask on that layer select the areas where you wish to "sharpen" and bring up detail.

I hope my little bit of advice can help...

[philbach]

Re: Old Color Photo with Serious Damage

Well this had multiple problems. I usually start with Color Correction. As far as the mirrored face I copied the layer using multiply as the blending mode and used a black layer mask and then painted in parts of the copied layer to remove some of the whitish discoloration.

I would guess that one hour or more would be needed to do a proper job. This rough restore was done in much less time.

[Cupcake]

Re: Old Color Photo with Serious Damage

Here is a web size.
I have a larger one if wanted.