This is an old picture of my father when he was young, in England.
So far, all I have done with it is take the marks off his legs and some of the scars from the wall, then sharpened it a bit.
My sister wants to enlarge it and have it printed to represent the original oil painting that ended up in my brothers hands.
Are there any volunteers out there that would like to take a stab at it.
My xcf is enclosed as an attachment below where I started it, the original layer is at the bottom, 2nd layer shows where I took out the marks on his legs and some from the wall. The third layer is where I sharpened it a bit.

Molly the only defects i see are the spots on the legs and the background wall has a few bad areas, but other than that it looks excellent to me.It is in fabulous shape in my honest opinion.
I would touch up the legs and maybe 2 or 3 spots on the wall behind and leave it at that.

This image doesn't need much at all done to it.The color tone is excellent also.
Gosh i love these old photos.Thanks for sharing it.

And kudos for keeping it in such great shape!

I did touch it up a bit with a slight s curve (Colors/Curves)


By duplicating the curved layer, and then applying edges >

A slight bit more detail using Filters/Edge Detect/Edges >Sobel >smear > amount 6 or so.


Then set that duplicate on overlay mode with a opacity at 15.8

I was trying to get the side of his face to have more detail.It may be too blown out though.

Looks really good Rod, I had a feeling you guys would like to play around with it a bit. I am sure my sister will be happy with whatever I send, I will send all I get and she can pick.
Thanks Rod.

Wait until some of the real photography gurus get a hold of it Molly.
Then you will probably see some real magic.

Can you scan it at 600 dpi?

Molly if I was you I'll take Rods advice. Your father looked cute in his young boy age

I will sit back and see what happens. I know of at least two in here that are so very good at this kind of thing. I really appreciate it, I was wondering if it would be possible to enlarge that without it looking grainy. I think she will want to put an old fashioned frame around it and put it over her fireplace. All you photo guru's will know about that cuz I certainly don't.
Mahv, I don't know if you are asking me or Rod about scanning. I don't have a scanner anymore.

I was asking you (Molly) if you could get the original image scanned at 600 dpi. A scan of a scan or enlarging the image x 6 won't work in this case. Even 300 dpi gives more room to work with than a scan at 100 dpi.

I did quickly
I mostly wished sharpen a bit and remove a slight greenish cast on the wall.



PS i added the xcf even if is a bit messy

thank you PC, that looks great too. Wow, my sister is going to have a big decision to make.

Mahv, I will get an email off to my sister and ask she she can do that. thanks

I had a go, mostly just for something to mess with

Very nice Amanda, my father would be so proud to get so much attention cuz from what I hear, he was a very unhappy camper posing for that Picture and there was an oil painting made with him standing there too.

Hi Molly, I also could not help myself. I scaled it to 300 dpi and extended the lower and upper margins a bit to allow a crop to a 5X7 inch and include the shoes. The original is a 3:4 ratio. I did the scaling in Ps (just easier) and then used Gimp for the rest. A very nice photo. I mainly used a bit of cloning to hide the worst marks and a very small sharpen. Any more sharpening introduces bloom and artifacts
I tried several ways of taking out the green cast. However, it altered the photo too much when you try to reintroduce a colour alike to the brown that is present here.
I am thinking that the green cast is now a part of the photo and should not be altered. Similarly , I think any further cleaning up of the wall behind the young man would destroy the charm of the photo and detract from the "old" feel.
I have printed this photo at 5X7 " on glossy paper and it looks lovely.
I have a 1.25 MB original which you are welcome to , Just send me a message with your email address. This one is 380 K
Cheers Wbool63

Nice result Wbool
the brown-reddish cast is part of the photo, the greenish may be a fungus or something else but can't be a original color, the photo was BW tinted in brown

But is true that just desaturate that have a ugly effect (I did try..not a good idea )better leave or after desaturation apply a new cast closer to that in the rest of the photo

Mahv, this is the same picture scanned as 600-dpi. It looks pretty dark and noisy to me but I know nothing about photograpy editing. Would this work to enhance the picture even more?
The ones I have so far are pretty nice but if there is a chance to make it wall size OR at least 8 x 10, 12 x 14 or 16 x 20, it would be great.

Nice!
Is that a bear skin rug he is standing in front of?

I doubt it but of coarse I wouldn't know. It is so hard to tell.

Molly, I was expecting a much larger file for a 600 dpi scan. Also, it looks like the image was scanned using the B/W line art setting, rather than greyscale or RGB.

The reasoning behind using a larger image size (scan) is to remove most of the noise without distorting the object of the image, which also allows for printing with better quality @ larger sizes.

O, darn, I guess my sister doesn't know much more than me. She sent it as a pdf, maybe it is larger. I added the pdf. maybe that is larger.
I can send her another email and ask if that is possible. Which is best, Gray scale or RGB.