Key
State: Indiana
City: South Bend

Picture Restoration

My wife's grandmother had this photo of my wife's brother, a large size (14x16 or so) print that had actually been retouched by the photographer...

A great photo of him as a baby, in a cute raincoat in the grass.

Great, right?

Well... not so fast.

Here's what the photo looked like:





No, I don't know who the idiot who ripped the photo is. I specifically told my wife I don't want to know... after all after all the work I had to do due to their brilliant decision I'd prolly have to choke 'em.

So there you have it...

The photo was cut up into 9 pieces, and had been taped ON THE FRONT with tape that had seriously damaged the photo even around the rips.

Talk about having my job CUT OUT for me....

So I spent about an hour getting all the pieces to line up...







I set every piece to mulitply and created a layer above all the others, used the clone brush and paint brush for the next 4 hours or so (oh yeah, did I mention I scanned it at 1200 dpi? You could see the actual paper fibers in the tears!)

By the time I was done I'd painted this:







Which doesn't look like much... certainly it doesn't look like 4 hours worth of painting ... but when you put that over the previous image you get this:






Then a levels adjustment, a very mild curve, some selective color to correct the colors, a little bit of saturation, and sharpening (you can't see the sharpening as I only did that in the for print verision) and here's the final result:






I sit here looking at it, and I just can't believe I managed to pull it off!



It's really awesome also because my wife's brother died tragically years ago, so a nice photo of him as a baby is that much more special for his family.

Alessandro