The end goal in all of the photo restoration I completed recently was to create a 20×30″ print that could be given as a gift to the children and grandchildren of the woman in the photos, who is now in her 70s. Rather than remove every photo from the background, I chose to make three of them retain thier “frame” and the others, larger and free floating in the foreground. I think this made for a more interesting and unique composition when all was said and done. Each individual photo is still in either a 4×6, 5×7 or 8×10 size, also, for individual printing.

This is a perfect example of how a photo restoration project can be both a way to recover and preserve family heritage, and a very cost effective way to give gifts to an extended group of people. Although this was a large amount of restoration overall, with the bulk discount I applied and the really low cost of actually printing individual fixed photos, the project resulted in a treasure for many people in this family. A similar photo collage approach is also ideal for photo memorials!

This very serious portrait was fading with age, and had become spotted with multiple stains.  To preserve it,  I removed all the brown stains, then adjusted the contrast and added back the sepia tone.

Adjusting the photo enhanced textures that were hidden in the faded image, like the lacy texture of her dress and paint strokes in the backdrop. I removed the black object on her chest, because it was too  nondescript to be sure what it was and it just looked like a blemish.

Something like this doesn’t take long at all but what a difference it makes in the final photograph, ready for framing.

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.

The trickiest part of this restoration was that the entire photo had a web of fine cracks and some serious deep cracks through both the faces and the fabric, which I needed to restore around without it appearing it had ever been damaged.

While some restorations can be done with a lot of filters and special effects in Photoshop, some need a lot of fine detail work with the graphic tablet and pen.

The results are worth it – in the end, you can’t even tell that the tears or cracks existed. And the detailed texture in the dress remains as true as the day the photo was taken.

My client on this project had a photo of her grandmother’s wedding, which had faded a great deal and become quite degraded over the years.

We discussed her expectations before I started – I wasn’t sure if there was enough information remaining in the original to get a sharp detailed result. Her priority was to enhance her grandmother’s face as much as possible. It’s important to understand that sometimes there just isn’t enough detail left in a photograph to restore, and that is why its important to digitize and restore old treasured family photos as early as possible. Another couple years and this young bride’s image might have faded from view forever.

This was the resulting photo of the entire wedding party.

Although it is certainly not as perfect as we’d have both liked to see, enough of the brides face was restored to give my client a reasonable likeness of her grandmother.

In the collection of photos my client wanted me to restore, there was one tiny 2×2 inch slide. It didn’t have a lot of detail and I asked what the story was with that one – he said it was possibly the oldest photo of his mother the family had. It was a negative and I really wasn’t sure if I could pull anything from it.  But I had to try!

The first thing I did was scan it at a very high resolution – increasing the size and capturing every available bit of detail.

Then I inverted the image so it was not a negative any longer and I could see the image I was going to restore.

Obviously, the resulting image was too faded so I adjusted it and started smoothing over the great deal of roughness in the image, that appeared when all the detail was enlarged. The final result is not perfect but it is a good deal better than the poor little slide, and I was able to provide something at 4×6 inches that was a pretty good likeness of the woman as a young lady.

My latest client collected a group of family photos on a visit to Africa, and sent them to me to restore.

As you can see, this wonderful photo of two little boys is badly damaged and aged.

It is about 40 years old so it has yellowed and up close, there are numerous cracks, both serious and fine.

The work took 4-5 hours total, because of the level of detailed work necessary to remove every crack, and repaint areas which were missing completely.  I also scanned it at a high enough resolution that the final image could be reprinted at 5×7 inches, and be a treasure to both men’s children.

The Catalina Islander, a local newspaper in California, hired me to restore and color tint this vintage photo to use for a July 4th edition. A reader had provided the photo, which featured his mother, on the left, as a young woman.

After I got past the initial puzzle of how the drummer was staying upright without a tow rope, in a day and age where Photoshop was non existent, I started by cleaning up some minor degradation and spotting. Then I adjusted the contrast in places that were dark but still needed color, like the flag’s stripes. The client provided some input into the colors to use, and I chose others that seemed appropriate. After a number of revisions, the new version looked like it had been tinted the way it was done by hand in the old days of photography – using Photoshop. This is the final result:

It’s always a great idea to include family history and stories in small family operated business web sites, and that is what Tobia Construction did on their About Page. But the photo of the owner’s father was a bit rough looking with age, and needed it cleaned up and improved a bit. There were some dusty parts, some specs of dirt, and a lot of fading in areas for me to work on, as you can see by clicking this image for a close-up.

Here is the final result, which I delivered in 4×6 format for reprinting or distribution to other family members – and scaled to a good size for the web page. I intentionally left the vintage look intact, and added a new sepia tone (brownish tint) which would have been appropriate to this time period.

People often ask me if I’ve ever been thwarted in my attempts to restore a photo. Usually not, I say – but there are some photo eras which for whatever reason are harder to restore than others. The photographic technology of the 1970s, is a prime example. However photos were printed in that time period, they tend to go extremely bad, even when sealed up out of the sun. And once the image is damaged like this, it’s extremely hard to bring it back to full quality.

This photo was kept in an album made for photographs, supposedly “archival quality” and it was taken in 1978. It rarely saw daylight so I was shocked to find it in this condition when I opened up the album recently. In fact, ALL the photos from that time period, printed this way, were in similar condition.

I can honestly say I threw more of my Frankenphoto super powers into this one than I do most – and this was the best I could get in the end. I offer it as an example of both what IS possible and what is not, so that if you have photos in this condition, your expectations are realistic about what kind of restoration is possible. Perfect, certainly not – but certainly more recognizable (and now digitally preserved) than the original.