The original photo had a lot of surface cracks and an “oily” surface stain that needed to be removed. As usual, I wanted to remove the degradation without losing the detail of the photograph underneath. I’ve noticed this is a problem with restorations I see online – they often blur the area to remove the cracks or stain but then everything is altered. I prefer to take a very high resolution scan and go in with a graphics tablet and pen and literally erase the cracks by hand without using any filters, so that doesn’t happen anywhere but in background sections. This is a close up of the largest cracked area I needed to repair:

The final restored portrait was a success – my client “absolutely loved them” – and it will be displayed side by side with the other portrait of her grandmother, the Girl with Hat that I restored.

The original photo had beautiful graininess and composition but the surface had degraded over the decades, with areas that had faded or cracked. The customer sent me a very high resolution scan so that I could retain all of that beautiful texture and remove the aging without losing the fine details.

Here is the final photo, restored. Originally, this was probably a black and white photo and I initially desaturated it to black and white to work on it, but then returned a sepia tone to make it look antiqued. That was done simultaneously with the Aunt photo, which it would accompany.

]]> http://www.perfectaphoto.com/2010/02/girl-with-hat/feed/ 0 http://www.perfectaphoto.com/2009/12/remove-people-from-background/ http://www.perfectaphoto.com/2009/12/remove-people-from-background/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:57:27 +0000 Eileen http://www.perfectaphoto.com/?p=493 This project is to be a gift from my customer to her husband for Christmas. She borrowed this photo of his dad, who passed away about 10 years ago, from her sister-in-law, and asked me to remove the background people and make him the focal point of the photo. The original was a bit faded and grainy in focus but by scanning it at a very high resolution, it was possible to do what was necessary.

I used elements from the background to fill in the places where I removed people, and extended building, ground and grass elements. Then I separated him from the background and blurred the background a bit to make it more out of focus, eliminating any signs that changes had taken place. I enlarged and color-adjusted him along the way.

Her response when I sent the final photo? Magic!

Having a family photo repaired as a gift is a great, cost effective way to give something to a group of people. One of my customers recently had a photo of her parents restored and will be having a variety of sizes printed to give as a gift to at least ten different people. Think about it this way – if the restoration costs $60, and the prints are .15 cents each, you’re looking at a very economical way to give a gift.

The more important consideration is the value your gift will bring. During these tough economic times, families are pulling together and helping each out more than ever. And the importance of gifts that have meaning – versus something you put batteries in and numb out to – is becoming increasingly evident. If you happen to have a great old photo of a family member in an album somewhere, cracked and faded, now is a great time to have it restored and give it to your children and grand children. Or perhaps you know your parent has such a treasure hanging in their home – let them know it is possible to not only make it look as good as new but share with their descendants. Have more than one photo in mind? I offer a bulk discount to anyone who comes to me with more than one photo to be restored at one time.

Give me a call or send me an email – preferably with a high resolution scan of your photo attached, and I will get back to you quickly with an estimate.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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