Below is my restoration of an old baby picture from the 1920s, using the computer
program Adobe Photoshop. By using Photoshop, old and damaged
photographs can be dramatically restored to former condition. A
exstensive description of what I have done to restore this photograph
follows the "before" and "after" images below.
This is of one of the most damaged photographs which I have
worked on. In the original at the left, much of the image itself has worn off of
the photo, resulting in massive portions of the baby's chest and head
being destroyed. Further compounding this damage is that there are several
folds on the photo, as well as prior attempts to tape the image in order to
hold it together. This tape has since become quite yellowed and results in
a very bad effect, especially over the name written on the bottom border
of the photograph.
The first area I worked on was the border of the photo, some of which was
either covered with tape or torn off entirely. I duplicated the areas of
the border that were undamaged and used these to replace the damaged areas.
Using this same technique, I then proceeded to repair the damaged areas of
the image.
The shoulder before and after
Some of these imperfections, such as the tape along the edges,
are rather easy to correct, but the difficult areas were the areas on the
baby's body, especially the head and arms. Some areas of
the baby's left arm and shoulder are discolored and slightly unnatural looking. While it is noticable, it is still much better than the empty space which had been in the picture previously. Due to the massive area that was removed, I had to reverse an image of the baby's other arm and reposition it in order to recreate the shoulder.
You may also notice that the restored photograph is much smaller than the
original. This is due to the fact that I had to crop off a significant
portion of the bottom of the photo, due to the colors there not being able
to blend together correctly in order to cover up the tape. However, in
doing so, the cropped photo is much more in line with a common photo size
than the original was.
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