From Torn to Terrific in a Few Hundred Steps

From Torn to Terrific in a Few Hundred Steps: "

A while back I had a friend who called me and asked if I knew of anyone that could do some photo restoration.  He had a very old original wedding photo dating from the 1920’s that had a pretty big tear through the lower-left corner as well as a large section missing from the upper-left portion of the image.  Of course I thought to myself, “I know Photoshop, how hard could it be?”  I took the image and said, “Don’t you worry, I can have this fixed right up.”  Several weeks later…

Actually, it didn’t take weeks but it did take me much longer than I thought it would.  Here’s how I went about restoring the image.

The first thing I did was to create a high-res scan of the original.  I then put it back into its protective sleeve so that I wouldn’t accidentally tear off any more of the photo.  From this point on, it was all about the restoration.  Seeing as how there was so much work that needed to be done, I began by fixing the small stuff.  I used the clone stamp the healing tools to start fixing many of the small scratches and marks.  After that, I tackled the large tear in the lower portion.  I used the clone stamp along with some copying, pasting, and blending to get rid of most of the tear.

Once I got these easier parts done, I turned my attention to the missing portions of the image.  This involved the creation of some new layers and then pasting textures and shapes into the new areas.  Most of this was a “best guess” because I had no way of knowing what was originally in the image.  I actually ended up stretching the upper edge of the image so that I could fix parts of the chandelier.  After all the restoration work was complete I added a curves layer and a hue/saturation layer to improve the overall look of the image. When all was said and done, I had a total of 22 layers.

Obviously this restoration was a little time consuming but I looked at it more as an exercise to practice many of the Photoshop techniques that I had learned over the past few years.  And as happy as I am with the final image, the real reward was seeing my friends face as I delivered a printed version of the final restoration.  Because when all is said and done, the real value of the photograph wasn’t in its age, but in the sentiment and ancestral connections that it represented to the owners.

Click on the image for a larger view

By the way, if you are interested in photo restoration techniques, you can pick up many of the same techniques from the same guy that taught them to me, Matt Kloskowski.  Matt teaches a class at Photoshop World called Restoration Rescue which is just jam packed with tips and tricks to retouch and restore old images.

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