When you get a photo as bad as this in need of photo repair, it is seriously tempting to let a quality photo restoration service do it for you. But if you were to tackle 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.
Creased up old photo restored
Patience is the key, its take a long time to fix a photo like this. Start with patching and retouching away the cracks that are on their own, giving larger 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. For a quality photo repair, 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. For more on this read, the post faces with missing pieces you may also come across some hair that needs restoring too.
In this case, a nose tip had to be borrowed from another photo and blended in. The windows in the background had slight restructure and overall tone and definition were improved with dodge and burn in subtle amounts. A low opacity layer of sharpening was added to the finally repaired old photo. Now we have the quality photo restoration we were looking for. You may want to downsample from your high res scan and apply a slight sharpen again depending on the final reproduction size.
Neil Rhodes
Image-Restore.co.uk Providing quality photo restoration Surrey and Farnham area