This image was scanned. It's a picture of my mom in her trade dressmaking class in high school in Los Angeles.

She is the one seated to the left of the lady standing. Don't know if the picture could be improved. It's in pretty good shape. I think it was taken early in the 1930's.

Looking at the picture, it looks like everyone is wearing the same style dress. Perhaps they all made their own in class.

I appreciate old photos. What resolution did you scan the image at?

I'm not the one who scanned it so I don't know.

That's a wonderful picture.
I have one of my Mom and two aunts when they were about the ages of 8-12. =)
I cherish it.Someday ill scan it and upload it here.

What a cool old photo.

Here's my go at "improving" the image:

Saulgoode, that looks so much better. The details in the image are so much clearer including even the reflections on the ceiling. Contrast is much better. Excellent work. Thank you very much.

@saulgoode,

If you don't mind, I'd appreciate some info on what techniques you used. It doesn't have to be a step-by-step tutorial, necessarily, although there might be interest in a tut. Most of the photo restoration I've tinkered with involved more cloning to repair areas where there was physical damage to the photo - I haven't done much in the way of enhancement.

That's a very nice job. It almost looks like a rescan at higher resolution!

@Bob63,

I didn't do a whole lot. I started by using Unsharp Mask with maximum radius and an amount of 0.3 or so. This has the effect of reducing overall tint casts without degrading the image. It is a "gentle" adjustment to the color balance, which in my experience hardly ever causes harm (whereas Auto White Balance is ofttimes too extreme).

Next I duplicated the layer and added a layermask initialized to a "Grayscale copy of the Layer". This grayscale mask permits me to adjust the intensity of the bright regions of the image separately from the darker regions. After creating the mask, I used the Levels tool on the top layer (make sure you activate the layer first) to decrease its gamma (make it darker). Similar results could be attained with the Curves tool but I've grown used to the flexibility afforded by using a layermask approach.

I then changed the tonality of the image to be more of a sepia rather than yellow. This could be done with proper use of any of the Hue/Sat, Colorize, or Color Balance filters; but if I recall correctly, I desaturated the image, created a layer filled with a solid hue of about "30", set the layermode to Color, and adjusted the opacity (again, I tend to prefer the more manual approach but this may be owing to lack of skills in using the proper filters).

I did a little bit of healing of some of the worst splotches (I missed the watermarks in the middle of the ceiling though), and cropped the left edge a little to eliminate some of that nastiness by the clothes rack.

I did it a little bit different . blurred Gaussian twice with 0.5 parms . This got rid of most of the artifacts , hue-saturation filter desaturate , very slight rotate, used colorise to add a tint, added white layer with color (blend) at about 60 % to bring the colour back to where I liked it best, cropped 4:3 . sharpen 35% then individual sharpen and blur to bring out lady next to standing lady. I deliberately cropped the standing woman to show her to be of lesser importance and so hopefully your mum is now the star attraction according to rule of thirds and the composition.

I think the whole picture is very important for history's sake but I thought a nice crop would make a better picture.

NB am working on a small notebook and the colours may require a bit more oomph! Hard to say with my machine.


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EDIT Insert.. (Blend)

Great work everyone!

The scanned resolution looks to be 150ppi. I analyzed it with a couple of programs, but found only the image resolution of 150.

That looks really good, too. Thank you very much!