Family Photo Restoration
A client contacted me to rebuild a family photo that she wanted to give to her mother as a birthday present. The photo had a piece of paper that had fused to the emulsion of the photo. Like all photo restorations, this project had its own unique challenges. The photo was 4x6”, dark and not in sharp focus. The area of interest in the photo, the people, were small within the photo.
I started by doing a high-resolution scan of the image. I then cropped the photo to focus on the people. Next, I retouched all the unnecessary things out of the background. I rebuilt the top of the mom’s head, added flowers that had been scratched off in the middle, and brightened the flowers. The graininess of the photo I couldn’t do much about, but I was able to restore proper tones and highlights in the faces. The original photo also had dull areas in it from something being spilled on the photo so I had to darken a large part of the photo to even out the overall densities in the image. The girl on the far right was too far away from the other two, so I moved her to the left to make a closer grouping. I added a bit more image along the bottom as well. There were many tiny scratches and white dust spots throughout the photo. I removed most of the large dust spots. Since I had made a high-res scan, I was able to enlarge the size of the photo to 9” x 6” but that left a lot of room at the top of grass. So I decided to add a floral border across the top for aesthetics. The client was very pleased with the final photo and confided that she didn’t think I would be able to save her photo. She framed the photo and happily gave it to her mom the next day.
Call me if you have special photos that have been damaged. I can restore them so you can preserve family memories.