Help George

[spiderdan]

Could anyone save old George Jabez Benton? I've tried with Photoshop but can't seem to get it right.

[spiderdan]

For anyone interested (no one is I'm sure) this photo was taken in the 1890s (or around then)and is of an ancestor who founded the family stone mason business.

[granthagen]

This isn't great, but I used PS7 and used levels to balance out the "color" and exposure, boosted the midrange a bit, applied the dust&scratches filter to the whole image, then smoothed out the background a bit more with the Gaussian blur filter.

Unfortunately, the d&s filter took out some sharpness which I tried to compensate for by applying Sharpcontrol, a free sharpening utility that I'm trying out. Might have to do another one using PS's USM and see if it does a better job.

Grant

[granthagen]

This one is better! I ran it through Neat Image, first for noise reduction, then did levels and applied USM selectively by painting on the effect via layer mask.

Grant

[creeduk]

Nice work on the second version, came out looking good.

[spiderdan]

Wow, thanks very much. If I ever put such pictures on my website (and if they're the ones you helped) I'll make sure to give you the credit.

Here's a couple more ancestors I tried colouring in (!):