As Prof. Petrik says, Photoshop is a very deep program. I've only scratched the surface but I already feel like I'm learned a lot. With just a few lessons and a few tools within Photoshop Elements, I can do a lot. I started with this image here. I downloaded her from the Library of Congress and her name is unknown, so let's call her Jane Doe. Jane's picture has a number of problems. I've already resized her image from 821x1024 pixels to 300x374 pixels to let her fit comfortably on the screen, but as you'll see in the next image I've made some other changes.
For this second image of Jane I made a lot of changes. First I cropped most of the extraneous frame
material. It was taking up valuable pixels and only made the image look messy. I did, however leave what I considered to be the attractive part of the frame, to give the image itself a nice edge.
Next I repaired the image as much as possible. First I used the Spot Healing Brush Tool on the smaller scratches and dots, just to make the background more even. Then, using the Clone Stamp Tool I worked on the longer scratches like the one near her shoulder and the darker one at the bottom of her dress. At this point I was pretty pleased with the results but I still felt her face lacked a little definition. Being One of the lightest areas it had lost some shadows so using the Brush Tool reduced to only 3px and with the opacity and fade at 31% I carefully went around some lines on her chin to giver her face a bit more definition.
However, I thought something was still lacking and as you can tell from the picture below, what was lacking was color. A little hand-tinting seemed like just the thing. I went with a shade of reddish-purple to try to imitate the kind of velvet frames they used to have, and looking at her dress I felt light blue
seemed like the most likely color. I didn't want to get too many different shades in there so I stuck with a lighter shade of red for the tablecloth and a darker shade of blue for the book on the table. Her lips were very thin and trying to color them looked very artificial but at the same time no color at all made them blend in with the skin so I compromised by doing a very small line of color that you can't see much of but still gives the lips more definition. Color for the hands and face, then a slight brown for her hair and the background completed the look. One thing that I found very helpful in this part was actually downloading some other hand-tinted images and sampling the colors from them.
While we all love Jane, there are times we don't want to see quite as much of her. Our hand-tinted Jane in all her glory takes up quite a lot of real estate on the web, so vingetting is a way we can keep her but maybe not see so much
of her. So I took the image of Jane which I had restored but not hand-tinted and used the Elliptical Marquee Tool to draw an oval around her (although if I wanted a tighter fit I could have used a lasso). Then I did Select > Inverse, and Cut, eliminating everything but Jane herself. I started with a Feather of 25px pressing delete twice or three times to give a nice blur to the edges. Then using the Paint Bucket Tool I filled in with the background color I knew I would be using on my website. I added a layer filled with that color as well, but changing the opacity to 59% so that you can see her but you could also read text on top of her. All you would have to do for that is put her as a background image instead of a regular image.
Of course, it's not just photographs that can benefit from these techniques.
Engravings especially frequently have difficulties being transferred to the web, they can often have bleedthrough from pages behind them. So I took this image from a bad reproduction of images from Godey's Lady's Book (I won't name names as to where I got this image, but let's just say it's an organization that has frequently been lax in scans of their engravings) and I did my best to improve it.
To get the engraving to look like this I used a combination of several techniques. First I switched the engraving to black and white to get rid of the rainbow effect on the original. Then I used the Clone Stamp Tool to eliminate the bleedthrough as much as possible. It still wasn't enough though in the
tight corners. So I carefully used the Paint Bucket to spill white on some areas. I used that sparingly though because in addition to wiping out the background it can also eliminate some of the fine lines on the engraving you want to keep. At the same time the paintbucket did such a good job in some areas that it was worth it. So I went along after that and reconstructed pixel by pixel the weak spots. Her left hand reaching up, the thin branch near that hand, and the leaves along the edge of the of the engraving were all areas I reconstructed pixel by pixel. The letters were so badly faded out by the paint bucket that I simply copied them from the original, then went pixel by pixel lightening the area around the letters.