Wednesday, October 26, 2011

photo restorations



(Click to see larger.
This third one was done days later. Sometimes I just have to come back and do some more.)


Goodness!  Fighting with blogger to get them side by side, but blogger won.
Restoration is my favorite thing to do with photo manipulation.  The older and more beat up, the more I love the challenge.  After a hundred or more, it's apparent to me that "more beat up" is not the biggest challenge.  It's those photos from cheap cameras that we all had in the 70's.  The pigments changed and bled, and the images were often blurry and distorted to begin with.  Frequently composition was bad too, film was cheap enough for everyone to take some but expensive enough where most people didn't shoot enough to get good.  Also, you had to commit to dropping off film and picking up prints.  I so love digital!!!  I am promising today to work a little harder on restoration of "bad" snapshots of the 70's.  I'm sure I'm going to have to inject them with a little more creativity than just sticking to the realism of what I imagined the original to be.
The photograph above is my brother's graduation from Navy basic training.  It was not the worst damaged that I've restored, and not my best, but close on both counts.  I had to go to another image and steal a bush for the background, convert to black and white, colorize, and blur to get it to match.  Some of the faces had to be composites of other faces in the crowd, eyes from this one, chin from over there.  I could have spent a few more hours to make them better (on some later date I just might, since the layers are preserved in photoshop format).  My sailor's face is intact so I didn't worry too much about the ones I don't know for family album purpose.  The delightful part was badly stained shirts.  Everyone is wearing the same one, so it was so simple to grab pieces for repair! 
This was pure fun, I gave up sleep for it after night shift yesterday.  Thanks to my niece, April Lewis Shriver for providing this and several more family hierlooms for me to work on.

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