Old Photo

[Hinfrance]

Very late to the party I was lucky enough to dig out the original image  which in fact features your great, great , great grandpa in his true colours. He was a secret Newcastle Utd supporter engaged in building the first St James` Park as an ardent fan. Sorry if this disappoints you.


PS No offence to your grt, grt, grt grandad. I started having a go and then got bored....

Stupid boy Pike . .

My workflow was simpler than Colins, certainly more low rent. If I was doing it 'properly' I would have used Photoplus because some of the tools are better than the ones in Elements, which was what I used here.

1. Open the image and duplicate the background layer
2. Apply a gradient map to convert to monochrome
3. Use a levels adjustment layer to reset the black, white and midtone points to suit.
4. Use clone tool and/or the content aware brush to remove the creases and rebuild the missing bits
5. Sharpen the image - there are loads of ways to do this, but I used Focus Magic with the algorithm on 'film camera'. Unsharp mask or luminance mask would work quite well too.
6. Add a new layer set to overlay and filled with 128,128,128, neutral gray. Using the brush tool with the opacity set to a low value dodge with white foreground colour and burn with black foreground colour as desired.
7. Make your final brightness and contrast adjustments and then colourise using an HSL layer hue around 36-39 and saturation dialed down to taste.

That seemed to take longer to type than it did to do.