Tuesday, December 31, 2013

A Graceful Photo Restoration

(I'm still catching up after our trip to VA, so please excuse these shorter non-posts while I get myself in order!)

Last week at my parents' place I scanned a few old photos of distant relatives. I've always wanted to try fixing up a damaged antique photo, and this one in particular caught my eye:

My great-great-grandmother, Grace.

(Interestingly enough, I believe she comes from the Eastwood side of my family - which would make her distantly related to Clint Eastwood.)
 

I worked on it on my laptop while chatting with family, and after two tedious hours in Perfect Photo, I had this:


I'm sure it could be better, but I think that's the best I can do!
 
There's something kind of magical about bringing an old photo back to life. I could do this kind of work all day; it's actually quite soothing. (And after a week of travel, family, and stress, I could use some of that!)

Oh, and John linked me to a Reddit thread where folks can post old/damaged photos and other Redditors will fix them up for free.  I'm especially awed by the ones where they add color, like this. So. Cool. 

Any of you have neat old photos you've restored? Or how about good displays? I'd almost be tempted to get into scrapbooking, just to make a decorative album for old restored photos like this!

32 comments:

  1. There's actually also /r/colorizedhistory, which you might also like (http://www.reddit.com/r/colorizedhistory)

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  2. If you do a scrapbook will you keep both photos? Because that would be seriously cool! So there's the old and loved (and beaten up) photo and then the lovingly restored photo next to each other, tying it all together.

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  3. Oh wow. Thanks for the info. I have several photos that were severely damaged when our home was destroyed in a tornado. I think I will go visit the site you linked and see if someone can help me fix them - because that would just make my year.

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  4. oh wow that is so great!! I love checking out the colorized history photos they make me smile. To see that someone loves history/photographs so much to repair them or enhance them just enough to let the natural beauty that was already in the photograph shine though.

    I want to learn to do this for my grandparents/mom we have a lot of old family photo graphs that have just been wore down with time.

    I am going to check out the perfect picture. The work you did is just awesome

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  5. This is right up my alley. I restore old photos every day for my job and I agree that there is something very soothing about it. If you ever need any tips just let me know.

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  6. Nice job on your great-great-grandmother's photo! (And cool photo btw!)

    I love going through my family's old photos too. I made color copies of some of my favorites, framed them, and covered the walls of the one hallway in my house. Over the years, I've been able to add some of my husband's ancestors to the collage. It's a fun way to display family without having it in your main living areas.

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  7. Honestly, I would rather see 100 "non-posts" from people like you and the Bloggess that just one from other bloggers! Glad you are relaxing after your holiday and have a serine New Year's Eve!

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  8. Nothing wrong with a short post. Especially when it's interesting like this one. The photo looks amazing.

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  9. That's awesome Jen! I like the idea of displaying them side by side. And you're related to Clint Eastwood? Very cool! Reddit does some really amazing things - that photo colorization was amazing.

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  10. wow. I know there are many old photos around of various relatives. I do not find tedious work to be relaxing, so I'm pretty sure I'd have to have someone else do this for me. But wow - great job!

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  11. Cool photo! Do you know anything about how it came about--the story behind it? Anything about her life? I think you did a great job with this image--I like the fact that it's NOT colorized. I love the look of old b&w (or sepia colored) photos.

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    1. Thanks! We found several other pics of Grace in regular period dresses, so I was curious myself. My mother thinks only one of Grace's parents was Native American, so it's possible this photo was just an homage to her heritage.

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  12. That is just such a cool photo on its own, but then you made it look even better!

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  13. Jen you should totally get into scrapbooking because I'd love to see what you do. :) Nice work on the photo touch up.

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  14. Yes! I did this for a coworker. Her neighbor, an elderly Greek man, had a beautiful photo of him and his beloved wife. For Father's day I believe it was.. or maybe his Birthday, my coworker managed to borrow that photo for him without letting him know what she would be doing. She brought it to me since I had recently been hired on as the Digital artist and wanted to know if I could blow it up and touch it up for her. She wanted to give him a larger version for the celebration. I scanned it in at a high resolution, went to town with my ancient version of Photoshop and my tablet and had it done in a night! He loved it. :) Came out perfect. You are very right that it is very soothing work.

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  15. That is a great job! I could never have done that! How interesting to wonder about her history, as you said in one of hte other comments, she might have been half Native American. We were talking the other day about how, unless there is something written on the back of an old picture, it can be so hard to tell much other than the era, even who the people are, but sometimes the mystery can be very exciting. Like FM, I prefer non-colourised photos, because I love the past and I love black and white and sepia, but I find clourising very interesting too. My partner's great aunt worked in a photo shop in her youth colourising photos, the photographer would come back from the wedding with notes about what colour the bridesmaids dresses were (apparently they were often three colours, like blue, yellow and pink) and they would hand colour the images. One of the girls they worked with was always making mistakes. It is a fascinating business that is now lost in history, with not a lot of people left to remember it, but it is interesting to think of how we can now fix old images with photoshop.

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  16. Nice work on the photo, Jen. I'm surprised no one else commented that there is a striking similarity between you and this woman.

    I used to work for a company that processed film for school photographers. (It was never dull!) My job was scanning then film for processing. Having had several awful school pictures, I would retouch a few. You could always tell which kids had been to lunch before having their picture taken! I would clean up chocolate milk and mustard stains on shirts and stuff like that. Sometimes, if a child had an unfortunate scrape on the face that was disfiguring, I would fix that. Skinned knees and elbows were left alone, because they told a story about who the child was at the time. I always felt bad for the kids in high school who had a particularly bad zit on their face at picture time.

    It is tedious work and can be soothing if you enjoy it and it goes well. It can be frustrating so retouching may not be for everyone. It is a great source of amazement to me how much retouching has progressed in such a short time!

    Thanks for sharing!

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  17. It's a *lot* of work, but at least scan everything you can get your hands on (at a very good resolution using a good scanner) so they're protected from loss! It's sometimes tricky to get close family members or more distant relatives to relinquish these treasures while you scan them, but they are so very thrilled when you can hand back both an original and a scanned file (fixed or not). I bet everyone faces the same problem of having photos figuratively scattered to the wind when you're cleaning out Old Aunt Maud's house - someone gets the photos and everyone else misses out. At least if they're scanned they can be shared and hopefully identified for posterity's sake.

    I've been the mad one in the family that has scanned and fixed thousands of photos, slides and transparencies from the eatliest ones we could find through to the family snaps that just pre-dated digital cameras. There's always more than come out of the woodwork which causes me much aarghing, but I've loved working on every photo. It's been very relaxing to commune with them, looking at all the detail that you normally miss when you walk past a wall frame or flip a page in an album. It's also been fun to sleuth around working out dates, locations and faces.

    I know my family treasure all the printed albums and dvds of images I've given them, and I can relax knowing our history is safely backed up in several locations!

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    1. Agreed. My parents scanned (and touched up some) the old family photos several years back. We all got a copy of the scanned photos when they were done. Not long after, they lost everything in Katrina. But we still have our family photos.

      My father had been through Camille and Betsy and lost almost photos then. I have only seen a few pictures of him as a young man, and one school photo as a result. So, he knew the importance of them.

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  18. You're an Eastwood too? My dad's family comes from Kansas/Nebraska area in the late 1800s/early 1900s

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  19. Nice job. :) I learned photo retouching while studying Graphic Design at college and it can be rewarding work especially if the photos have personal significance. Recently I restored a bunch of old family pics for my grandmother's memorial, including one that my grandfather has carried in his wallet for decades. I also found a large stash of Victorian era photos featuring distant relatives. My plan is to create a digital library so any relatives who want a copy can do so without losing track the original. It has been really interesting to learn where I came from and see these fascinating people I can call family.

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  20. Fantastic job! About 10 years ago I collected a lot of old family photos and had a project getting them digitized and restored. I had a lot of copies made for other family members too. I used a professional photographer from town. I had him make prints of varying sizes from 8x10, 5x7 and even 4x6. He did some minor restoration for free, and charged some for major restoration. I bought a ton of frames and have about 30-40 photos going up our main staircase. The frames are all pewter-look and many match within the same family group. The project overall took me about 3 years, mostly because all our families are out of town. I'll try to send you a picture of the wall of pictures - I'm pretty proud of it.

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  21. Lovely! Both the photo and your retouching work! I retouched a damaged hand tinted photo of my grandmother, and had it printed, so that all the cousins could have a copy. I'm trying to decide what to do with the original- should I attempt to have it restored professionally, or just leave it as is? My husband and his brother copied all their old family super 8 movies into video and scanned photos and slides- both have given copies to all their children. It's an amazing gift to receive your family's history! Thank you for sharing this!

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  22. Awesome! Earlier this year (oops, last year!), I started a project of scanning all of my grandma's photos to give copies to all of my family members. Over 1,500 photos later, I still wasn't done by Christmas! As an "in the meantime" gift on Thanksgiving, I made everyone a Shutterfly book of my favorite photos from the time my grandparents were dating, all the way through to the pictures of my grandma with her great-great-grandchildren. Everyone loved it! My mom and I have recently really gotten into the Shutterfly books. They aren't very expensive (especially if you have a Groupon), and they are a lot less messy than actual scrapbooks. My mom has done a few of our family vacations so far, and I want her to do one of all of my dad's projects around town (he's an architect). So many ideas! Might be an option for you. :)

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  23. That turned out beautifully, Jen!

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  24. Very nice!
    Here's one of my mom's kindergarten pic. I fixed the levels first but decided to have fun coloring it.
    Before and After.
    One of my mom and dad as teens in Daytona Before and After.
    And for the heck of it, a silly steampunk pic. :D

    I've done some work fixing tears and removing creases and whatnot, but don't seem to have any examples handy. It is very soothing work though.

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  25. I love it! Thanks for sharing this with us.

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  26. I've been reading over your Epbot posts that I've missed over the holidays and I was shocked by this one. My great grandmother's maiden name was Eastwood. She wrote to Clint but never heard back from him. I wonder if we're somehow distantly related too. :P

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  27. You should check out Somerset legacy magazine.. or, umm.. older issues are somerset memories. They show some gorgeous work of family albums and adopted ancestors. I'm always on the look out for ancestors to adopt at flea markets, because I can't seem to get my hands on real ancestor photos... not even to copy... but I'm still going to make pretty things with them. :D

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  28. Really neat! I don't think my family has photos that go back past my great grandparents. Good job on the restoration!

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