Breathing new life into old photos since 2012.

Author: tim (Page 8 of 8)

Moderate Alteration: Removing Small Distractions

I enjoy restoring damaged, worn, and faded photographs to their original splendor most of all, but I have other tricks up my sleeve. If some unwanted objects are spoiling the ambiance of your treasured memories, I can often wipe them out of the picture.

Here is the B’nai Abraham Synagogue of Philadelphia. Bernard Levinathal, Rabbi of the B’nai Abraham, officiated the marriage of my great-grandparents in 1909. Removing the power lines from the clear blue sky was relatively straightforward. Removing the garbage bags from the front left took a little more work. Lastly, I tweaked the contrast to bring out the colors.

Light Restoration: Desaturation, Clean-Up

Taking color out of a picture is simple. Adding color to a black-and-white photo is a trick. Aunt Rose’s valiant attempt at hand-colorization didn’t quite convince. The skin tone is unnatural and heavy brush strokes span the lips and eyebrows. Removing most of the color and cleaning up around the lips and eyebrows quickly restored this photograph near to its original splendor.

Major Restoration: Optimizing Time and Quality

Sometimes a customer may be interested in settling for something passable, rather than perfect, if the customer could thereby save time and money. Although I quoted this request at three hours, I ran into trouble while restoring the standing boy’s left hand, which had been completely obscured by a stain. Instead of piling on the hours, I simply copied the sitting boy’s left hand over and slightly modified it slightly. Although, I spent about four hours on this request, I’d charge the quoted three hours and leave the customer with the option of buying more time to work on the hand. One possible solution would be to photograph a model’s hand and then replace the boy’s hand with that of the model.

Major Restoration: Rebuilding unique features

It will often be impossible to perform these requests convincingly. In this case, there happened to remain enough visual guides for me to imagine where things ought to be. The task was painstaking. I spent a good couple hours rebuilding this gentleman’s eye, ear, lapel, and collar, among making numerous other repairs.

Moderate Restoration: Many minor blemishes

These repairs were not very painstaking, but the sheer number of them made for a time-consuming request. The most difficult part of this request, of all things, was restoring the footstool at lower left. Removing a crease across the woman’s waist and blending out the water damage also required additional care. I also added some contrast.

Moderate Restoration: Tearing around details

This request is on the lighter side of moderate restorations. It required the corrections of two punctures, a tear, and a pair of creases. The tear around the brim of the hat and ear required the restoration of some fine details, as did the tear around the girl’s sleeve and coattail at bottom right. Perfecting the shadow behind the girl also required extra care.

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