Monday, February 15, 2010

Photo Restoration

I’ve had an old photo of my mom and her siblings for awhile now.  I finally feel confident in my editing abilities to attempt to restore it.  I think it turned out great!  My mom, aunts and uncles will love it.  My mom is the young girl in the bottom row, she was around age 4.  I’m amazed at how much Charlotte looks like her!  (Charlotte’s birth mother is my sister.)

Basically I used a lot of the ‘fix-it’ tools in Photoshop.  Spot healing, patch tool, clone tool, dodge, burn, blur.  I also used a minimum filter and then a maximum filter to get rid of the white speckles.  I upped the blacks slightly and added some contrast with a curves layer.  I also straightened the photo, which cropped it a little.

Before:SCAN0044

After:SCAN0044_final_straight

3 comments:

Monica said...

Wow! Your photo restoration is so much better than the one I did! Great job! I can't believe how much your mom's granddaughters look like her at that age! So cool to see all the Aunts & Uncles at such a young age.

Thank you for sharing Salina!

Ladibug said...

Excellent job my friend.. i'm going to have to get some tips from you. Are you getting all your tips from tutorials or a book? Curious.

Also it's amazing how much Charlotte looks like your mom. Great picture.

Salina said...

I have a photoshop book that I've opened once. I have some video tutorials that I did when I first got PS, but my computer wasn't powerful enough to watch the videos and use PS, so I quit using them half way through.

Now I read a lot on photography message boards/forums as well as blogs like Coffeeshop and and Pioneer Woman. I religiously use google for when I want to do something specific. I look up several tutorials and try to edit a couple different ways to see what I like best/which one I'll be more likely to remember.

It has really helped me to rely on the drawing class I took in college. I have to see the photo in 2D with just shades of gray in order to fix it, otherwise if I start seeing it in 3D I mess up the photo/shading and make people's eyes on noses all wonky.