Whether it’s a box of photos, or pages in an album, to a keen archivist it’s the challenge of the undiscovered country, a set of visions created by dear friends or relatives, to be rendered in modern digital terms.

The image above represents three generations.  On the left is Meredith, her mother Helen in the middle, and her mother-in-law, Margaret, on the right.  Standing behind her mother and grandmothers is the HP as a young lady.  This is just an awesome composition, but what attracts me most to this image is the HP’s classic Mona Lisa smile, and those eyes.

My father in law, Carl J. (Joe), was an inspired shooter,  who has left his family with a great wealth of images.  Joe shot using a number of formats, including Kodak 126 format and and 35mm, with output rendered at the local photo mill standards of the time.  The image above was recorded using a Praktica 35mm camera.  The source image for the restoration, shown below, was a scan of the printed image generated using an HP ScanJet at 1200 dpi – yes, there are better scanners, but honestly, I’m not certain that they help much.

The image was scanned into RGB colorspace.  Contrast was enhanced by adding a curves adjustment to the individual red and green channels.  The image was then converted to BW,  and the contrast then further enhanced using Nik Silver Efex Pro.  Noise and dust were removed a combination of the Clone Stamp and Healing Brush tools in Photoshop CS4.  In practice I find that regions that have a constant tone are most efficiently repaired using the Clone Stamp tool, whereas the Healing Brush tool generally works better on regions that contain complex patterns.  In all cases, keeping the brush size as small as possible generally produces the most favorable results.

The heavy lifting in this image was the removal of an outdoor service outlet along the wall just above and to the right of the head of little HP.  I cloned in a replacement seam from the set of shakes that lies to the right of where that service outlet exists using the Clone Stamp tool.  Reasonably convincing if I do say so myself.

If you are serious about image recovery, there are a number of excellent published texts on the subject.  My current working texts are Scott Kelby’s ‘The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers’,  Katrin Eismann’s (with Wayne Palmer) ‘Photoshop Restoration and Retouching’, and Ctein’s ‘Digital Restoration from Start to Finish, Second Edition: How to repair old and damaged photographs’.

Copyright 2010 Peter F. Flynn. No usage permitted without prior written consent. All rights reserved.