Need advice from the experts…

[lwbeasley]

I finally had to give up on this one, so it is available once again for anyone who wants to tackle it. 

I have some questions about what to do with areas that are so badly damaged that nothing can be recovered. The before and after sample here is certainly not finished. I still have lots of details, such as the face of the baby, the couch, the skirt, the lamp, etc. to work on but I need to know if I am over doing it. 

For instance, the window on the left has a Christmas wreath and I think some greenery and lights on the window sill. I can't re-construct those, so is it better to remove them as I have done and just have the bare window or blur those areas or what? I can't make the table under the window look real, so should I just remove it and clean up the carpet? 

The couple and the baby are certainly the important part and the focus of this photo. But, will the family say "hey, what happened to the table and Christmas decorations" or will they just be glad to have the photo restored?

[Hannie]

Hi lwbeasley,

I somehow missed your post, you did a beautiful repair!
Yes, you are right, the owner will be so happy to see the results of your hard work, with or without wreath I'm sure. 
You may want to ask your distributor if it is OK to crop this impossible restore, we can only guess what the missing parts look like?

I tried the crop below, used your work and for the baby's face used the original (with a layer mask)
Also I blurred the edges of your repairs just a little with Lens blur so they fit better with the overall blur of the original.

You have done a great job!

Hannie

[lwbeasley]

Hello Hannie,

Thank you for your reply. I wanted to crop the image from the very beginning, but I thought cropping and sharpening were not allowed. Had I known I could request approval, I certainly would have.

I continued working on the restore for a week or so and made further improvements, but was never quite able to make it acceptable and finally gave up. My distributor placed it back in the gallery for download. It remained there for more than a week and finally disappeared. If someone else is working on it I would be very interested to see their final results.

Regards