can this be restored?

[Carly]

hi, found you all from the talented folks at PST. my first post here. a coworker gave me a couple of photos of his family to play with and i was going to try to clean them up. i thought maybe you all could give me some tips or links to tuts or perhaps in this forum that could help me out. i'm curious how to get rid of the extreme graininess/texture in this photo.

[freelancer]

Hi Carly,

I'm new to restoration also, but you'll learn quickly with all the information available here and at other sites.

I think your first problem is file format. Never save a photograph in .gif.

I was able to remove the grain using the methods found here at the tutorial forum and by using google to search for other methods and tutorials.

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=152

Regards

[T Paul]

Hi Carly,

First off you need to work in a different format when retouching photos. As freelancer mentioned, gif is not an ideal format for photos.

The GIF (pronounced "Jiff") is excellent for graphics with a limited number of colors. It is idea for saving graphics with solid colors and reducing a file size for the web. It is not a good format for saving photos because it can only display a maximum of 256. Therefore, if you save a photograph as a gif you will lose a lot of valuable information.

JPEG (or JPG pronounced "Jay Peg") Most often used for photographs. The advantage is that the full color spectrum (24 bits) is used: ideal for photographs as it supports 16 million colors vs. 256. A very big difference! This is the best format for scanned photographs used on websites or for sending your photographic images in email, because the file is wonderfully small, often compressed to only 1/10 or 1/20 size. However, this fantastic compression efficiency comes with a price. JPG uses a lossy compression (throws out information in order to compress the file size). If you ever find the need to modify and rewrite a JPG file, it will lower the quality of that image even more. EVERY TIME you MODIFY and save the file, information is loss.

TIFF (or TIF) Most used for master copies of high quality images. TIFF is the most universal format, about any program on any platform will handle TIFF. TIFF writes a large file, and it uses LOSSLESS compression, just meaning there are no losses, meaning that you can always read back in what you wrote out, without data corruption. If you might ever be modifying and writing the file a second time, then use a non-lossy format like TIFF.

So in short when working with photographs always save a master file in the tif format. Your final product can be a jpeg, but keep a the master as a tif. That way you can always go back and work on it without losing any information.

See if your coworker can rescan the photos and save them as tifs or at least jpegs. They will be larger files, but this will give you a lot more information to work with, and in the end produce highly quality images.

[Mark Adams]

I agree, there isn't enough info in the image. I'm a novice and I've diddled with this for several hours now. I can't come up with anything that looks like a photograph. Maybe we could just call the texture "charming" and settle for something like this?

[Carly]

freelancer, i have saved your image and i will give it to my friend, with credit to you. thanks so much for the info, both of you. i will try to see if i can get the original from him and scan it so that it can be perhaps worked with better. this is how it came to me, unfortunately.

happy 4th!

[Carly]

acck, Mark, did we post at the same time? i'm sorry you spent so much time on it, but thank you for the work on this. i will save it too (credit to you). i noticed when looking at the histogram of this pic that it didn't look good according to one of the tutorials i finished viewing today; there were hardly any lines. i will try and get a better scan.

[saby]

Hi Carly!
You can take any questions sy will answer u.
saby

[Ms Bay]

Carly's Photo

Hi Carly!

Here's my attempt. This is such a charming picture, it looks as if it were done on canvas. Here's what I did. I applied a Gaussian blur at 4.5 then faded it at 50%. I then went to unsharp mask and slid the amount to 50%, the pixels up to 50 and the threshold all the way. Then I went to contrast and adjusted the photo to a nice clear tone. To get the sepia tone back I added a new layer and used the eyedropper on the darkest part of the background of the original picture, I painted bucketed that layer and adjusted the opacity down to a nice sepia tone that looked like the original. Go into contrast again and adjust it down to a tone that you like. It sounds like a lot, but it took me all of five minutes to do it. I hope this helps!