Cleaning up a photo

[dhamon]

I have a picture here which is a small jpeg from a rather bad scan, and I'm trying to practice cleaning up with it.

This is the original photo:

I cropped it , ran auto colors and auto levels, and then desaturated the lips a bit, but it still looks not-so-great.

Any tips on fixing it up?

 

[Lynny]

Fixing up photos, is a long slow process, not something you can do with a few filters. Thats like the difference between fine art and a paint by numbers.

It's nothing for me to spend 2-4 hours solid fixing up a photo. Do you want to spend that sort of time??

If you don't the just make a dulicate layer and play with the merges, overlay can work well if you knock out some of the opacity.

Best to start with that largest possible scan you can get, then resize when you have finished.

Lynny

 

[Welles]

While perfection does take time, for web work reasonably good effects can be done rapidly with a few filters. Here's my take on the original image manipulated in under 3 minutes using iCorrect Edit Lab to adjust the color folowed by Focus Magic to, well yes, refocus the image and get rid of some of the jpeg artifacts.

As far as your job goes, I'd try the unsharp mask filter to sharpen the image, maybe erase most of the artifacting on the white background, and maybe use a selective color adjustment layer to boost the blue of the turtleneck and perhaps in the reds a bit more magenta and yellow in the skin tones.

 

[Rantin Al]

Another quickie, about 3 minutes.

Duplicate Layer, Overlay, 50%
Merge
Selective Colour Adjustment, Neutrals, Reds & Cyans
Sharpened with High Pass filter method, 1.5 pix, Hard Light @ 40%
Straightened, cropped and border applied.

The methods are endless.

Get the best image you can to start with and you will end up with a better final image.

Al.

 

[(PSD) Sergiy]

(PSD) Sergiy

I`m not an Expert with cleaning up Photos, but i will give a try:
I used some of the "color Balance", Some "Equlize", Littlebit of "contrast" and littlebit of "Hue and Saturation"