Old Slide edit - Help

[CherylL]

The old slide from 1961. I scanned on an Epson 4490 at 2400dpi. Edits in PS: ACR for exposure, highlights, dehaze, color mixer for the blues. PS neural filter photo restoration. High pass Overlay. Spot healing brush. Neural filter again for scratches at low value. The photo is blurry. Better way to clean up and sharpen? Anything I should adjust to the edit? Thanks

Original

Edit

 

[cooldood76 75]

Topaz can clean it up.
If you don't have the software send me a copy of the pic.

 

[pez]

Yeah, Topaz is awesome.

 

[CherylL]

Topaz can clean it up.
If you don't have the software send me a copy of the pic.

I used the Topax Gigipixel upscale with face recovery. It helped slightly. I don't have the full Topax plugins. I think with PS you are allowed a certain number of uses of the Topax Gigipixel.

 

[webestang6415]

If using Epson software the "color restoration" in the Advanced section will sometimes help with bringing back enough color to make few more adjustments. As I can still see a bit of the actual colors in the original it might be worth a rescan to see what it can do.

 

[CherylL]

Thanks everyone! The photo is blurry I think beyond what can be fixed. The slides before and after were in focus better. My Dad was a new camera user and years later the slides are sharper.

 

[TJMcG117]

I see you may have given up, but I'll reply anyway. While your Epson 4490 has a top optical resolution of about 1800 dpi, if you scan at 3200-4800 and output a 16-bit uncompressed TIFF, you will get more pixels to work with in post. You should turn off unsharp masking and ICE dust removal, and do that later. Using Topaz Photo AI will get you face recovery and sharpening better than what Photoshop can do, but if you don't have that, you might also try uploading to the free Nano Banana on Google Gemini. It will not usually give you accurate faces, but they might be close enough that no one would really remember what they looked like 65 years ago.

 

[Rickbb69 8]

I've had good to mixed results with some of the free online AI repair/upscaling tools. You could try one on the original, wouldn't try it with something you've already worked on it PS.

 

[CherylL]

The group photo was sent to Mpix and came back better than I thought it would. The print could make out the faces. Still a tad blurry/hazy, but in a 5x7 was acceptable. I sent in about 2 dozen other scanned slides and the Kodachrome slides really pop especially the reds. I had to edit out the scratches and mold spots.