I recently took on a restoration project for a friend, repairing several images of her family from the early 1900’s. This was probably the most damaged of the lot with a lot of fine scratches and spots to go with larger discolouration, blemishes and tears. I don’t have a lot of experience with image restoration, and it’s pretty amazing how much you can achieve in Photoshop. I used my Epson Perfection V750 scanner to capture the image in TIFF format at 1600 PPI to allow for resizing/enlarging. This is helpful when you want to magnify the image to see details and make minute adjustments. I took it from there in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet. I found the Healing Brush somewhat more useful than the Cloning tool in most instances, other than where I had to create a part of the image from scratch. Of course, I did everything on layers rather than the original image so that I could backtrack if necessary and/or try different approaches. Fortunately, apart from jackets on the left and right sides of the image, I didn’t have to rebuild clothing from scratch. I’d probably spend more time on those, if anything. As it is, I spent 4-5 hours working on the image.
I’d originally decided to crop out the frame, as it was badly damaged. In the end, though, I thought it added a lot to the image. While the finished product doesn’t look like the original, I was able to clone enough of it to build a new one. An alternative would’ve been to use a stock one, I suppose, but this worked well enough for my purposes here.
