Photo Restoration Project 1

This was one of my first project in Photoshop. Most of it was done using rubber stamp tool, adjusting levels and brightness.

This is a photo of my mother-in-law, Helen (the one on the left) and her sister. Sadly it was ruined: it was stored with other photos, they got wet and stuck together. After separating them, parts of the photo were damaged by water, other parts were lost.

I used rubber stamp tool to make the background look cleaner, and to fix ruined parts of the photo. Then I used "select color range" to select all the gray areas in the image, modified the selection a little and filled it with yellowish color that was sampled from the same photo with color picker.

Added a shadow by selecting that part of the image and adjusting the brightness. I think with the shadow the background doesn't look so flat and the photo looks more natural (seemed like the original had the shadow also.)

Cleaned up the signature by making the ink darker and the background lighter. Selected top-left part of the blouse of the girl on the right and adjusted the color (added some yellow) then added just a bit of a motion blur (regular blur didn't look natural for some reason.) Changed the size of the photo so we could print it on a 4x6 paper.

Here is an interesting twist. Almost a year after I finished this project, the second copy of the photograph was found, one that belonged to the other sister in the picture! It was interesting for me to compare my photo to the original good one. Other than the color [which was yellowish on the photo I scanned originally] I would say that it's pretty close...