Photo Restoration: A photo from the late 1800's

By David Parrish

Posted: 02/24/14

Category: Photo Restoration

Last week Jada and I received a phone call for another very exciting photo restoration project. A family of three generations had a photo of one of their great grandmothers that has been aged and cracked through the center. It was a giant print and quite beautiful. Other than the massive crack across the center of the image, there was sun damage, staining, and the photo had hundreds of tiny cracks in the paper. Below is an overview of the process I used to restore this photo. 

Step 1: Scanning.

The image was massive (16" x 16") so I had to scan it in quarters. The crack played in my favor while scanning in the image.

Step 2: Piecing the image back together.

Once I had all the pieces scanned in, I opened all of the quarters in photoshop. 

I then rotated all of the pieces so that they meshed together.

Step 3: Blending the seams.

Once everything was lined up, I began to blend all of the seams using the stamp tool, spot healing tool, and paint brush. 

Step 4: Adjusting colors.

Using Adobe Bridge's hack, you are able to open .jpegs in raw. I prefer editing colors and luminance in raw so I saved my PSD as a .jpeg and opened it up. 

Step 4: Removing mico-crack, spots, and stains.

The last step for me is the most tedious. Zoomed in super close, I sit for an hour and remove every crack in the picture with multiple tools.

Finished Product: