i have to keep fiddling with these and i *think* i am getting a little better. *smile*

this photo was actually not in bad shape, but i thought it could use a little zip.

here i played with the methods we have learned in class, plus some that were suggested over at retouchPRO.com. most of their tips are aimed at photoshop users, but i did pickup a few things that i could translate.

one hint was working from channels that have been split from the image. we did that with a flower one term, but i never thought of trying it on retouch photos. i worked here from the lightness channel as my base, and when i saw a bunch of white spots in the almost black hue channel, i flood filled it and re-added it under the stack and that saved a lot of cloning out of white dots in the background of the original scan. (at full size, they were very evident.)

i also made a mask from the image luminosity of the lightness layer and used it for a very slight blur on a duplicate of the background.

after i had the black and white layers the way i wanted them, i did a merge/flatten and ran some auto enhancement adjustments and adjusted the histogram.

then i started colorizing. per suggestion, i promoted each selection to it's own layer so i could adjust blends and opacity levels of each to my tastes. all selections ('cept for the whites of the eyes where i forgot ;-) were saved to the alpha channel of the psp file.

i noticed as i was going through that i was getting *blotchies* again, so i went to the full photo layer and pulled out my retouch brush and set it to soften, usually at 3 or 4, but a bit larger in larger areas, a 57% opacity and a hardiness of 67 and started trying to soften some of the spots away without losing the detail. i still need some blotchy practice, but it's getting better.

some of the other features i used were adjustment layers for levels and hsl, manual color corrections & assorted blend modes for the multiple layers and fade correction. retouch tools such as soften, smudge & push were used as needed on the color layers.

when things were finally getting where i wanted them, i merged/flattened the layers (on a copy of the original psp file) and then reran auto adjustments & histogram settings, resized and applied an unsharp mask. i'm getting there, slowly but surely...haha

i surely wish someone would write a class or book on this type of restoration for psp. there seem to be several recommended resources for photoshop, but NONE for *us*.