Help with photo restoration / fading?

[Daylon]

Doing a job for a friend, and ideally she wants me to restore color and quality to a badly faded picture of her parents -

This is the first scan - and try as I might in curves and photoshop and lightroom, I just can't get it to a print quality that I would feel comfortable charging money for.

Any help / tricks / pointers on doing these types of restorations? Big problem is that the print is on this stippled paper, so when I try to sharpen it, it looks like crapola in PS -

Any and all help appreciated - at this point I'm going to tell her it's beyond my skills to make a quality color-restored print of this.

D.

[janetg]

my first bit of advice, would be to get a good b/w rendition - then do hand coloring

if that does not work - look into the red channels, you may be able to pull a good b/w from that..

next, i would try kodak gem plugin (or rok, i can't remember which it is) - really good at color restoration.

[luis_relampago]

Here is a quick try, with some adjustment layers, curves, Levels and B&W. Also I used the surface blur and gaussian blur. Still needs more retouching on the skin and also the noise levels.

[Peacock]

My quick try.
Duplicate Layer, Levels adjustment for red, and then adjustment for skintone.

[bluman95]

This is what I did to the b/w version:

Auto-Levels
I used the b/w conversion from Photo-Plugins and amped up the red.
Just a little bit of curve adjustment

The color version:
Auto-levels
Curves
adjusted color balance
exposure bump

Hope that helps. Can you post a full rez version somewhere to play with?

[René]

Too many steps to list, but many mask layers of exposure, photo filters, levels, curves, Hue/Saturation, etc. Oh, and of course a noiseware. Still seems a bit on the cool side to me, at least in spots. This is the first time I've ever tried something like this, fun stuff.

[Daylon]

The noise seems to be the main issue for me - I returned it to her yesterday and said it was beyond my capabilities. I'm sure some of you "pro" PS people could probably do it, but realistically that would be a several hundred dollar job I'm sure. I was trying to get something print quality fairly easily -but I guess in certain circumstances there really isn't a quick way to do it.

Thanks for everyone's help and attempts!

D.

[bluman95]

I'm sure part of the problem is the very low resolution needed to post on here. The higher the scan quality, the more information there is. It is easier to recover data on a much larger file. If you can post a full rez copy somewhere, I'm sure one of us could figure something out.

[dpena]

wow everybody did a pretty good job !