Severe Photo Damage
Every so often, I see a photo that is so badly damaged that I wonder if I can actually fix it to my own satisfaction. The trick is being able to see beyond the cracks and tears to what was there before, and have the ability to repaint the areas that are gone. Although time consuming, this is far more possible than if the photo I’m working with is badly blurred or faded to the point that no detail is there.
When I first saw this photo, I knew I had a challenge ahead of me. It was only 4×6 inches, and torn in so many places that it was held together on the back with scotch tape, folding in my hand. There were large chunks torn off the edges, staining and yellowing, and areas of what appeared to be a dark speckled dirtiness that I’d never seen in an image before. I scanned it as is, at the highest possible resolution I could. I was going to need to work on this in great detail and every pixel would count. But I could see that underneath it all, there was a rich, detailed photo of a beautiful woman and it was my job to save her.
Here, you can see a close up of one part of the original.
One of the first things I did was remove all of the unnecessary background so I could focus on her face and dress. Then, zooming in, I restored bit by bit, starting with larger areas and then zooming in even deeper for close up, tiny work. I had to recreate a number of areas, like around and through her right eye, and carefully restore her face to reality. The dirty areas were another challenge – having not encountered that kind of damage before, I had to experiment with techniques to make it go away, without ruining patterns and textures underlying it.
Here is the final image, which I was able to enlarge for a 8×10 photo print.
Tags: family, family history, genealogy
