Metamorphosis of an Old Photo
This is a picture of Tona's dad that had been scanned, this is a great way to digitally preserve old photographs for future generations.
This was when he was in the Marines in the 1950s and the photo had suffered through the years.
Old photos were state of the art at the time but since they had not been around long enough there were issues of longevity. Many printer inks and photo papers today claim 100 years plus. Only our descendants will know for sure...
We can be thankful for digital but there may be issues years down the road as new equipment may not read old media or the old digital formats may not be in use. Another one to leave for our descendants to figure out...
First step: opened in Photoshop Elements (PSE) and used plugin Topaz DeJpeg. This helped remove some of the blockiness that occurs with .jpg files as it is compressed. This also amplified some slightly green noise in some areas which was not a concern since it would be converted to black and white later so the color issues would be taken care of.
Second step: ran PSE plugin Topaz DeNoise. This is an indispensable plugin for removing noise from my camera photos taken in less than optimum light. It was more economical to buy it as part of a package deal and now the Topaz plugins have become very useful tools. I was not sure how it would handle the noise from an old scanned photograph but it handled it very well at its highest setting. This removed the green noise which was a plus but a side effect of noise reducing programs is a softening of the detail. Typically DeNoise adds some fine grain back but this was undesirable since I was going to try to sharpen it up and the extra grain sometimes interferes.
Next: ran PSE plugin Topaz InFocus to address the softening from the noise reduction. I had to run it at a fairly low setting to keep from introducing artifacts in the eyes and around the pins (high contrast areas). If you look closely at the edges of the photo it did introduce artifacts there that I would edit out in the next step. As with most intense picture adjustments there are tradeoffs in most actions you take to get the gains you desire.
Lots of liberal use of the healing brush and clone stamp in PSE. Also converted to black and white. This took a couple of hours... It still left too much blotchiness on the face so needed some other medicine.
Next came Topaz Adjust with the portrait smoothing option. This really smoothed out the blotchiness on the face but further softened the photo overall. I also used the PSE Smart Sharpen option to recover somewhat from the smoothing but I felt there was not enough definition for such a manly portrait.
Finally: layered a copy of the previous step using the hard light setting at 20% opacity to bring out the lines and edges and this further reduced the noise on the face.
Now looking back I would probably have performed the portrait smoothing much earlier which may have helped with the healing and cloning.
Photo retouching/repair is an art that I have not mastered. I'm just learning as I go and offer this to maybe give you some ideas.
