[Bud]

A co-worker has asked if I might be able to help her work a little "magic" on the attached scanned photo of her parents. I have to admit that I have VERY limited PP skills and the software I'm using is PSE 5.

My question is this... Do I have the capability with PSE 5 to improve this pic and, if so, can you please give me some pointers. The colors are pretty washed out, but if I could get some of the skin tones and contrast corrected, I think that she might be able to get a decent print for framing.

Thanks!!

Bud

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Last edited by Bud; 01-17-2008 at 12:24 PM.

[BPT]

If you can adjust curves and pick white point, grey point and black point you should be able to do it. At minimum pick something white ans something black and it should remove most the yellow cast, at least it worked for me before.

I can do it when I get home in about 2.5 hours if you like.

[mithrandir]

Bud,

I tried a few things in Lightroom and Paint.net but at my skill level, I don't think much can be recovered.

[Cloudy Wizzard]

A co-worker has asked if I might be able to help her work a little "magic" on the attached scanned photo of her parents. I have to admit that I have VERY limited PP skills and the software I'm using is PSE 5.

My question is this... Do I have the capability with PSE 5 to improve this pic and, if so, can you please give me some pointers. The colors are pretty washed out, but if I could get some of the skin tones and contrast corrected, I think that she might be able to get a decent print for framing.

Thanks!!

Bud

I guess you can do it in PSE5 but I'm playing with CS3 at the moment so I used that.

What I did was :

1. Added a levels layer mask and set the white and black point (to remove the yellow cast as told above).

2. did some spot removal with the "spot healing brush"

3. converted the image to LAB mode and use the "no brainer" curve to add some contrast and to pump up the color (the LAB stuff was from a lesson on Kelby Training on LAB that I saw a few days ago and it works fairly well for some photo's. I think you can find some more information if you google on Canyon and LAB color mode, this is mostly used for Canyon shots at least the tutor from kelby training told this).

4. did some more spot-removal, noise-reduction, and some other minor tweaks.

5. Finally I copied the background layer (flattened the image first) and then used the "Multiply" mode so the overal image got darker.

hope you like the result.


I actually asked a similar question on the NAPP forums a few days ago (had an old photo of my grandmothers house that was really discolored and bad looking).

The advise those people gave was :

1. Get the book by Katrin Eismann, the "Photoshop Diva". She's an authority when it comes to image restoration. I ordered the 3rd edition a few days ago (the 3rd edition deals with CS2 but I guess it also applies to CS3 and there is no CS3 edition yet).

I don't expect you to buy it though, since you might not be willing to do this on a regular basis, I decided to get it because I've got a bunch of old photo's I want to restore so it might justify getting the book in my situation.

2. Make sure you start from the BEST POSSIBLE scan !. What they advised was getting 1 of 2 Scanner programs. 1 of them was VueScan (the other was SilverScan or someting I think) because they can do some color-correction when scanning so you can remove some color casts when scanning.

Anyways, this is just the opinion of some of the people on the NAPP forums that replied to my thread there and I thought it might be valuable here aswell.

Also, from what I've been reading Photoshop is ALL you need to do this, so no plug-ins needed because Photoshop does it all.

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[Cloudy Wizzard]

I just had a quick look in PSE6 and it looks like it doesn't have LAB mode, so you can't use LAB to do some color correction (you might not need it thoug).

This is what I got after a few minutes with PSE6 (spot healing seemed to work even better in PSE6 then in CS3 but maybe that's because I use it incorrectly in CS3)?

[mithrandir]

Good job. You found the colors.

[Cloudy Wizzard]

Good job. You found the colors.

Tnx, I'm not fully satisfied with the result but I'm having a headache so I didn't take as much time to work on it as I would like.

It only took a few minutes and I guess with some more work it can be improved even more.

[Bud]

Nice work, gang!

I'll try messing with PSE 5 a little more, but I don't think I'll be able to improve on your efforts... well done!

[Buddha Jones]

OH, a photoshop challenge!!!! I'm in! I will try it when I get home, this looks like a fun one.

[Cloudy Wizzard]

OH, a photoshop challenge!!!! I'm in! I will try it when I get home, this looks like a fun one.

Hey, If you're gonna make it a challenge I might have to try again but harder this time

and the retouching and restoration book by Katrin Eismann that I order hasn't even shipped yet

@bud :

If you wanna improve the photo yourself you might wanna consider asking your co-worker to get you a "better" scan of the photo (or maybe you have one but since the size limit here you posted a small JPEG ?).

I think when you start with a bigger TIFF or something scanned in a high resolution you can do some more/better improvements and then scale the image down to the "original" size and save it as a JPEG orzo.

I think scaling the large image down might also hide some small imperfections that you have on the large image ?

But then again, what do I know about photo restoration I just started last week (but the NAPP people advised to use a good scanner and scanner program so I guess there must be a good reason to get the best scan possible to start with).