Never understood the ‘breathe in’ advice. Breathe out is better…
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An old guy asked if there was any way this old photograph with his father on was salvageable.
That’s his father in the middle holding the ball.
This is how the photo turned out after first carefully cleaning it then processing through Photoshop.
I was chuffed to bits with his reaction and the result.
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Witchcraft!!
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And Brylcreem
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North Devon - 18 April 2024
Looking across the River Torridge to the villages of Appledore and Instow from the Skern pebble-ridge. The Torridge was as still as a pond at low tide this morning.
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A wonderful restoration job. Thank you.
(I conclude that you are 56.)
Chris
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56 Chris?
My guestimate from the info provided !
Or some kind of grease!
From what we’re seeing, that second photo never came from the first. We’d need to see a like for like scan, if that’s just the purpose of your ‘nice photo’.
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Thanks Count.d for taken the time to view the photo and for your comment.
You are, I suppose correct as the top image is the original but cropped for the purpose of posting and comparison. I have taken out a lot of the brick work at the back as the original photographer must have enjoyed looking a t bricks which completely over powered the subjects. So as of a couple of days ago this is now the only copy of the original I have kept.
Before I worked on the photo it was cleaned with a mild cleaning solution producing a much clearer and far better image which was then scanned onto the PC.
The image was opened in Photoshop and adjustment to the levels brought about a good start.
It was then opened in Topaz Photo AI where it was Upscaled by 400% percent (I think) and a couple of enhancements applied.
Then opened again in PS where most of the laborious work was done spot healing; cloning layering and sharpening by utilising the unsharp mask tool on certain layers set to 84 4 2 to only sharpen certain aspects of the image.
Once the noise; tears and other anomalies where corrected it was again opened in Topaz Photo AI and the miracle of face recognition did its job along with some sharpening and a little further noise reduction.
Back to PS and a few cropping adjustments and filters applied - all over about a week or so.
If you look at the lad sitting in the middle on the right - his feet appear to be suspended as there was a step upon which the chair was sat. I extended the chair leg and bloody forgot about his feet, resulting in the fact that this is the first thing my eye is drawn to when opening the image.
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Not sure what you mean - but thanks for the comment.
I’m not talking about the crop or subtleties, the original scan you’ve posted is so poor that it makes any comparison useless. Not trying to be funny, just would have been interesting to see what has been achieved. Never used the Topaz, I would have just done the whole thing in Photoshop.
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No reason why it shouldn’t. Do you think that it has nothing to do with the original photo?
In some ways it doesn’t matter as the end-result was I’m sure a complete success for the owner of the original photo and a real testament to the power of digital tools available these days.
I would say however that I couldn’t quite see that the ‘original’ posted would ever have had the dynamic range or resolution to generate the final image - maybe Topaz AI is partly key (never used it), but there are compression artefacts/lack of detail in the original as well as what I’d humbly describe as underexposure (probably the wrong phrase if scanned) which would make recovering details in the darker areas almost impossible from that image posted alone. I’d assume there was a considerably better source image to work from but the end result is amazing. All down to personal preference but maybe I’d have liked a more sepia tint and would have retained many of the blemishes on the original.
I suspect the original photo has been returned and the ‘original’ image is just a not particularly representative one in terms of resolution and too contrasty/dark to allow manual recovery of shadow details.
Maybe I’m more out of the loop these days with such tools in which case a remarkable result, but I suspect the image used to generate the retouched version was far better.
Alternatively it probably would have been easier to generate the ‘original’ from the second version than vice versa.
It is, of course, possible that the whole things is faked. That would certainly be very easy to do. But I have had considerable success in restoring old photos (mostly my father’s or mine, but also other people’s) and it is quite impressive what can be achieved. And that was some years ago with old versions of Photoshop, long before AI entered the room. I haven’t done much recently, but some of the capabilities of Photoshop, Topaz and others are impressive. Though they can make glaring errors.
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