Fixing Damaged Photos and Very Old Ones...

Photoshop 5.0 is where I started learning to use Photoshop to fix photos. Thought I would go crazy until a friend and I hooked up with learning to do it together. Then after learning the basics I went wild as I usually do with something I love to do like art or photography or fixing old photos. Now I'm using the CS2 version of Photoshop, not CS3 but hey it works and that is all I can ask at the moment.

This last week I offered to fix a photo for a friend here on Gather. She kindly allowed me to give it a try and from her response I guess I didn't do such a bad job of fixing her grandfather's World War II photo. It is nice to be able to make a friend happy or smile.

After fixing her photo I remembered another photo I had worked on but this one was quite a while back. About eight years back I was visiting a girlfriend who lives in New York, well, just outside the city not in the city itself. While there we were going through a drawer of her family's photos and we came across a photo of a work of art she had done. She had painted a mural on a wall for a friend; she didn't say if he had been an old boyfriend. I didn't care; it was the horrible condition of the print that I was thinking about and how to fix it.

This photo had been in a drawer for over twenty years and it had not been treated very kindly in any form. It was torn across completely, dirty, scratched, damaged with water and who knows what else. I asked her if I could try to fix it for her. She said sure. She told me that the original work she had painted was just of a Ram's head not with the stars that I saw on the print. The guy who she had painted it for had added the stars while she was gone to get her camera to take a photo of the mural.

I brought the photo home with me and scanned it into my computer. Opened it in Photoshop and went to town. Now I see so many things I would have done differently than I did back then. I would have isolated the Ram's head, removed the background and worked on the Ram's head fixing the scratches and torn area. I would then replace the background using a layer for it alone.

While writing this I find I must go back and do the things I should have done back then but didn't know how to and did not have the plugins I do now to help with the corrections. Contradiction since I didn't know how to do what I now know what to do back then. So the photos you see are of both my attempts to correct what time and little hands had done over twenty years.

 I found the original scan of the photo and the corrected version that I had done so many years back now. First after removing the background from the photo I used a color correction plugin called Color Washer (this is from The Pluginsite.com) to correct the fading of the colors and give it more vibrancy. 

I then used the Clone brush in Photoshop to correct the many blemishes and the torn line showing. I also used the Healing brush to help with the corrections to give the corrected areas the same look and feel of the rest of the photo.

This done I duplicated the layer and removed the stars from the photo as I did in one of the original corrections to show what the painting had looked like before they were added. Now having one layer with the stars and one without I set to replacing the background behind the painting.

I sampled the original background color in an area that looked like it was close to the original coloration. I created a new layer in PS where using the fill brush I placed the color on that layer. It did not have the right look so I added texture but this gave a too strong of a look to the background. I used Gaussian Blur to lessen the effect of the background and mute the over all affect.

Now having my background and the two layers with the fixed Ram Head I proceeded to merge the background with the corrected Ram painting. I copied the finished layer and created a new example of both corrections.

Everyone who knows me knows I love to experiment and yes I did with this one as well. I added a drop shadow to the different corrections one with and one without the stars to give the Ram Head a look of being off the background. I also played with the background and used a wood look as well.

Attached you will find the original photo before corrections, the first correction I did years back and several of the corrections I did last night.

I hope this gives others ideas as to what they can do with old photos laying in drawers that have lost their beauty over the years from scratches, rips or general wearing. Maybe if you can't do it yourself you will find someone to do it for you who is experienced doing such repairs. It takes time to do it correctly but it is worth the effort to have a renewed photo of a loved one or favorite photo.

Have fun!