Fri, Jan 11th - 7:49AM

When you get a photo as bad as this, it is seriously tempting to let a quality photo restoration service do it for you. But if you were to takle this one it might be easiest to airbrush a new back ground or cheat by tightly cropping the photo so there is less work to do.  This of course isn’t what restoring is all about. 

It is about quality time restoring photos so they look like new from the time and period they were taken.

Patience is the key, its take a long time to fix a photo like this. Start with patching away the cracks that are on their own, giving larger and and larger areas to sample texture from when you patch some more.  Think of the photo as a sliding block puzzle, you are simply moving areas from one place to another to replace a bit that is missing. Sounds easy does it not? Obviously there is a degree of care from where the replacement texture is taken from, so that the new section blends in well. It’s not much good patching a smooth section of sky with texture from somebody’s woollen sweater. Common sense and patience is the recipe for success here.

When it comes to rebuilding the facial areas or areas where you have to be creative with your patching, slow down.  Take a look at what you have in front of you and with a bit of imagination and  perhaps a rescale here and there, possibly a flip, feather and blend, you can fill in the gaps. You may have to retexture afterwards by first rubber stamping in the correct tone from a nearby source and then patching to regain a little texture.

In this case a nose tip had to be borrowed from another photo and blended in. The windows in the back ground had slight re structure and overall tone and definition was improved with dodge and burn in subtle amounts. A low opacity layer of sharpen was added to the finally repaired old photo. Now we have the quality photo restoration we were looking for.  You may want to down sample from your high res scan and apply a slight sharpen again depending on the final reproduction size.

Neil Rhodes

Image-Restore.co.uk Providing a quality photo restoration service