Retouch attempt 1 in progress....

[Dangelica]

Grrr photobucket account vanished.. will sort it out once i recover it

[boldblend]

Looks great!

[PamEli]

Impressive...

[ML Photography]

Well done!!!

[codewarrior00007]

How did you do it?

Please do tell ...

[Dangelica]

1. Scan and save as a tiff. The higher the res you can scan at the better.
2. Desaturate. You want any colour casts or stains to be greyscale.

3. Adjust your black point to match what you would think to be the blackest point in the photo. (In this case her jacket). Likewise adjust your white point to match what would be the whitest point in this case her collar.

4. Start with the largest areas of damage that are not on peoples faces and use the cloning tool to cover the cracks.

5. As you get to details on people blow the picture up and use progressively smaller brushes to clone / heal areas.

Eventually it will get to areas where you are at nearly pixel level to "paint" in a missing detail like the edge of a pupil.

Once you have a pretty decent image you can copy the layer and add a pixel or two of gaussian blur. Then you can use the eraser tool to remove the blur from detail areas like the eyes.

[OkNewbie]

Good job! That would be tedious work!

[themadness]

i used to do this kind of stuff as a contractor for a local photog. he suggested to zoom in really tight and use the lightest gray tone i the pic to add small reflections in the eyes based on the direction of the light source. he said it would make them look less "dead". looks great!