Damien Symonds

No, with a photo open, please.

May I see a screenshot?

Partially reducing opacity of all the text would be the first step.

I'm so sorry, there's still no better method than the one I first described. You'd need to work patiently on a dodge and burn layer to get rid of the rest

I think this is perfectly feasible, it will just take a LOT of patience. A lot of borrowing tiny parts of the three to form a 2, lots of tiny cloning. I made a bit of a start:

Oh, what a great challenge! I'm up for it. I figure you'd want the 2 to look like the one in this set?

I used the Clone Tool at 20% opacity, for most of it.

Oh, ok. I assumed you'd showed me the strongest area. May I see a 100% crop of the strongest area?

Beautiful. As far as the leg goes, just plain ol' patient low-opacity cloning.

Channel Mixer layer ... Red +100,0,0 Green +30,0,0 Blue +80,0,0 See if that helps.

So, show us the same two 100% crops after noise removal.

No formula, sorry.

Thanks, but now I can see how awfully noisy it is. Please remove it and post the 100% crop one more time.

May I see?

What are you talking about? These are razor sharp.

http://www.damiensymonds.net/how-do-i-retrieve-lost-or-damaged-images.html

Yep, cloning on a separate layer with a big soft brush, and don't be afraid of going over the dog if necessary. Then mask afterwards.

Bridge.

These are great!

Yes, you don't crop at all. The Crop Tool doesn't enter into this method, not once.

Now mask VERY carefully down that right-hand side of the people.

Oh gee, that explains it. Can you take the 100% crop again, and save it at 70 or above?

Grossly untrue, yes.

I see absolutely nothing out of the ordinary here. This is perfect. No they don't. If you're seeing it like that, I suspect it's a problem with your screen, or lack of calibration.

By the way, please don't waste your hard drive space by working in 16-bit. It's completely unnecessary. May I ask what quality level you chose when saving the jpeg files for upload here?