SITE DESIGN TIPS

I recently stumbled over (literally, the attic light wasn’t working…) a box of old family photos, in very bad condition. They needed more than just retouching.SITE DESIGN TIPS

I recently stumbled over (literally, the attic light wasn’t working…) a box of old family photos, in very bad condition. They needed more than just retouching. They needed rebuilding. Here’s an example.

It’s stained, faded, and badly torn. I believe it’s my mother at about age 5, which means it was shot in 1909. Can this picture be saved? I hope so. The first step with a photo as faded as this one is to desaturate the color, to get rid of the sepia tone, and then to adjust the curves to bring up the contrast. It takes a good deal of tweaking to get the midtones in place without overdoing the whites or blacks.

Now, it’s time to start working on the torn pieces. I like to use a technique I call “drag and drop editing”. You simply use the lasso to select a small piece of something the same color or pattern that you need to fill in the gap, and use the Move tool with the Option key to duplicate it. You can drag a small bit and drop it as many times as necessary to replace what’s missing. Of course, it’s easiest to see what you’re doing if you zoom in to 200% or more. At 500% you can actually repaint individual pixels.

Of course, you can also use the rubber stamp tool to place duplicate brushes full of whatever you have selected, but I often find that the drag and drop technique leaves a less noticeable edge. The blur tool, with a very small soft brush shape, helps blend in the corrections. Here’s a close-up of what I’ve done so far.

Where there are bigger areas that are similar, like the girl’s skirt and the chair, you can take bigger bites of the surrounding area, and cover more damage faster.

I’ll use a hard edged rubber stamp to rebuild the missing part of her shoe. Hard edged, because there has to be good definition between the edge of the leather and the background. The soft edged tool I’d use elsewhere just wouldn’t work here. Of course, I could also use a brush and paint in the toe of the shoe, but since it’s small and round, the stamp is easier to control.

After doing a bit of spot removal with the rubber stamp, it’s almost done. The next step is to make a simple vignette effect. On a new layer, I’ll place an oval marquee around the picture, just inside the parts I want to hide.

Then I invert the selection and feather it by 10 pixels. I’ll select an appropriate shade of gray from elsewhere in the photo, and simply pour it into all four corner selections.

As a final, optional, touch, I’ll try bringing back the sepia tint. The most effective way I’ve found to do this is to convert the image to grayscale and then to make it a duotone, using two shades of brown, rather than brown and black. With preview turned on, I can try different color combinations until I find two shades that look good together, and then tweak the curves to bring out the detail.

And here’s the final version, next to the original – not merely retouched, but reconstructed.