huma

tranquil222 and (PSD) Sergiy, you both have done fine work. The best solution may be a combination of blurring the AB channels of LAB and some conservative airbrushing.

This may be a good topic for a challenge.

tranquil222

If getting rid of the halftoning artifacts is the point, which is what I think it is, there is no way to do it without "filtering" channels (meaning blurring and sharpening, which are not effects filters) individually. For instance, there are extreme bands in the blue channel in this image, for which hiding would not be acceptable by blurring all of the channels as a whole, which is what it looks like has been done with your example. You would just median/blur/sharpen the blue channel to get rid of these and then smooth out any other imperfections in the other channels.

tranquil222

It may look filtered in the end, but thats really a price to pay for having such a degraded original.

(PSD) Sergiy

Hey tranquili you telling me that i took this picture through many
of the :filters: like "median" and stuff like that?
Yes i did! But most of this job was done by
using "Replace", "Dodge", "burn" and "smugle" tools. Wich after
were put through couple of Adjustments: "color
balances", "replacing color" etc...
And again i put little of "Dodge" with "Replacing" tool on top of it.
Please... don`t tell me, that my work is fake and you are the best
with your Lab and Smyk.
" I dont know what you was trying to say by that, but i got the
point ... And even if i had gone through it settings, its looks much
better... " And again i can be wrong "

tranquil222

Im not arguing my way is better, its just the way i would do it. Its not how you do it but the end result that really matters. I think yours looks perfectly acceptable minus the yellow bands in the blue channel. awesome.

(PSD) Sergiy

I though for couple minuts that i was being atacked... [confused]
Thanks fot the fair conclusion [righton]

Josh

You can't. You can improve it, but it will never look great.
There are limitations to what you can do with Photoshop or any other imaging product and this is one of them.
It's plain simple; important pixels were lost or damaged.
You can't create anything out of nothing. One can only guess what kind of information was lost. I had a look at all three channels and each one of them is severely damaged. I won't give this one even a try.

MsOz

ciwecom, just ignore the doomsayers that come to this party late. I'm sure you do not expect a "great" looking image out of something this crude, but that is far beyond saying the image can't be helped.

As you have already seen, improvements have been made, and further improvements still can be made. I was able to smooth the banding in the green channel by taking sergiy's results and adding a small amount of noise, gaussian blur, and then applying a small bit of the sandstone texture, which I blurred again. It's still no Richard Avedon (a very famous portrait photographer), but again, that would be unrealistic for this quality of reference image. As the old saying goes, "you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear." But, we might be able to fix you up with a nice brushed suede one! [righton]

tranquil222

I never saw any banding problems in the green channel, it was the blue channel that was the worst...

MsOz

tranquil, the original image shows a real strong herringbone pattern in the green channel, which is smoothed somewhat by sergiy's technique, but I still see it more as horizontal shadowy bands.

Reduce the size of the image on your desktop with the Navigator slider. It's like stepping back from an image, and you sometimes see things that don't show up as well at close magnification.