This is an aunt and nieces portrait from one of my favorite eras – I love the clothes from this time and covet this gorgeous ladies shoes!

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.

I’ve shown you how I can tint photos using Photoshop to give them color – but finally, I got to see in person what a tinted photo done the old school way looks like up close.

This photo was originally black and white, and someone had carefully hand painted every bit of it with colored dyes, to make it look like a color photo. The problem? This 4 decade old photo had gotten some water on it and the ink had run!

The original was about 8×10. I scanned it at a very high resolution so I could see every detail, and went in with my graphics tablet and removed all of the cracks, large and small. I also removed a lot of speckling that had taken place in the dye surface. That was really the easy part and something I do regularly.

Replacing the area which had been wet was a bigger challenge because the ink had all run to the color blue. I needed to repaint it based on what little I could see underneath, and pick up the dresses fabric pattern from the areas which weren’t damaged. This was obviously the most time consuming aspect of the restoration.

In the end it was worth the detailed effort – here is the photo, restored and ready to be printed again.

This family photo of a Florida vacation in the 1960s, has become deeply faded from being framed in a sunny room for decades. I was given a digital scan of the original to see if I could restore the color.

It took dozens of adjustments to get there but in the end, I was able to return much of the color to the image – which is pretty amazing when you look at the faded one and how little actual color is there. Unfortunately, this is pretty typical of photos taken with the photography technology of that era – and since photos are meant to be displayed for all to see, this is a common occurrence.

Now that it has been restored, the families of all five grown up children can get a copy to print and hang – or store safely on a CD.

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 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.

There was a time when if you wanted a color photograph, the photographer would have to hand tint the black and white photo with colored dyes. This was a very detailed, time consuming process but the result is a beautiful “old fashioned” look that I’ve always loved. When I received this cool young photo of my grandmother Rose, a woman who often wore bright pinks and blues, I knew I was going to have to give it a try – only instead of using dye, I’d use Photoshop.

This is the original photo. As you can see, it’s quite nice – very textured from the paper it was printed on, and only a few minor imperfections.

The first thing I did was scan it, and do some clean up, so it would look like this. I also desaturated it (made it all grey) which removed some of the tiny brown spots that were splattered about.

I had the fortune to know my grandmother so I knew she had beautiful blue eyes, light brown hair and a fair, rosy complexion. I started this project trying to approximate those colors myself – but it turned out to be a real roll of the dice, fifty bazillion shades of blue and brown all considered. Then, I had an idea. I could sample colors from an actual photo of her! I had this one, the grandmother I knew growing up.

A few wild and fun hours later – voila – a “hand tinted” old photo of Rose! As with the traditional method, the goal is to get as life like as possible but of course, there is nothing like the real bloom on a Rose’s cheek (hey now, don’t groan!). I found that laying on flat color was relatively easy but for it to look right, quite a bit of fine tuning, detailed painting and color adjustment was needed to give it depth and realism.

Here’s a closer view so you can see the great texture that is in this image.

For a really nice effect on your old black and white family photos, let’s give tinting a whirl!

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.