I know you're probably thinking "He did such an amazing job of fixing that old photo yesterday, what could he possibly do to make it even better?"The answer is "Not a hell of a lot." but I'll show you a few things that you can duplicate in Photoshop Elements or Photoshop CS4.
My only real concern after the work shown above was the brightness of the car windows. I wanted to make them a little darker so my adorable little face would stand out more. One way to do that is with Photoshop's curves adjustment. That lets you try different adjustments to diferent levels of brightness. You can leave the middle tones untouched and darken the very brightest tones only. That's what I did here.
Yet another way Photoshop provides for an adjustment like you see above is the adjustment layer. You can click on "brightness/contrast" adjustment, brighten the baby and then use the built in mask in the layer to remove the brightness from the window area. By doing this on a separate layer you can also darken the lower layer, under the adjusted layer, to darken the windows even more.
I did no sharpening at this stage because it just wasn't necessary. Sharpening old photos like this one can just bring out even more noise or "pixel squares". Sometimes it's useful but often it's not. I did do another pass with the noise reduction filter just to smooth the look of the photo a little bit.
I realize that these adjustments are not at all specific to an old photograph but they will apply to many of the photographs I'll be fixing this year as I go through my Mom's collection.
Tomorrow I'll talk about the criteria I'm using to select which of these hundreds of old photos I'm keeping and why some of these old photographs haven't faded or discolored while others have really degraded over time.
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