December 19, 2009Restoration of 55 year old photo of me and my Mom
Saving a faded old photograph: photograph is approximately 55 years old. This is a photo of me and my Mom that I found when I was looking for old family photos to scan. Standard fare here really as far as restoration goes. I'll use Clone Tool, Spot Healing Tool, Patch Tool, adjust the color and crop it. EXIF Data: I scanned the photograph into Photoshop and saved an original. Then I saved it again as an "edit" file - which in my workflow means that it is a photo in the process of being edited. I first duplicated the layer (CTRL-J). Normally, I would click on the Create new fill or adjustment layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette, and chose Levels and make adjustments here levels to get a good tonal range from very dark to very light. But, in this case, I went to Image->Auto Color, and this did a great job on this photo. I have good tonal range and will tweak it later if necessary. I clicked on the Create new layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette and renamed this layer "Spot Heal". I used the Spot Healing Tool (J) or (Shift-J to cycle through the healing tools) to clean up small dark and light spots and some small creases. I clicked on the Create new layer icon again to add another layer and renamed it "Clone". I used the Clone Tool (S) to clone out creases and discolored spots in the photograph, and to clone in the grass at the bottom. Then I made a new composite image at the top of the stack by hitting Shift-Ctrl-E. I duplicated this layer twice, then turned off the top layer by clicking on the "eye" icon next to the layer. I put the first duplicate layer in Screen blending mode to lighten the faces. Then I turned the top layer back on (click the "eye" icon again) which hides the layer below, and I put a mask on this layer by clicking on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette. The layer mask was white, and using a medium sized soft brush with black selected, I painted over the figures and faces to lighten them slightly. I then merged this layer down (Ctrl-E), then created another duplicate layer (Ctrl-J) to do sharpening and noise reduction. Next, I sharpened the image using High Pass Sharpen - by going to Filter-Other-HighPass. I adjusted the slider until I could see some details, and changed the blending mode to Soft Light. I merged this layer down (Ctrl-E), then made another duplicate layer to do noise reduction. I don't normally use other filters when doing Save My Shot Saturdays, but when there is a LOT of noise, I find that Noise Ninja does a very nice job of smoothing out the noise. And that is what I did here - I ran the image through the Noise Ninja filter to smooth it out. I decided that I really preferred to crop the image, and did so, then added a white border to the new crop. Done!
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