Photo Restoration
A client approached me about an old navy photo of her grandpa that she would like to have restored. She had colored on the photo with a ball point pen when she was young, as any child may have done, but now had deep regrets about it. The photo was on classic photo paper of that time period, circa 1940's, and was showing its age. Some of these signs of aging you can see in the original image below; cracks, rips, hazing, frayed edges, and of course the pen marks on the collar. Some of the problems are less noticeable without viewing under high magnification; yellow coloring bleeding through the image, creases, holes, spots of color missing, and even small areas where the details where gone completely. For these missing details, (ie the way the striped collar folds under in the center rather than coming to an end) I needed to do some research on what the uniform for this time period actually looked like. This allowed me to recreate the shadows and light for a more realistic finished product. Keeping the textures, blur, and feeling of the original image was very important, as I did not want the image to look new.
It was such a pleasure to be able to restore this photo for my client and return some happy memories!
Tools used - High resolution scan into .tiff format, photoshop, and lightroom. Final image printed on canon archival photo paper with canon 100+ year inks.