Other Projects - Photo Restoration

In addition to scanning the negatives and pictures that Ellen sent, I have been working on some other projects unrelated to family history. One of the more interesting ones is a photo of President and Mrs. Johnson that I restored for a friend at work.


In these before and after pictures, you can see (click for a larger image) that the original was very faded and retained very little color information. After scanning, and using only Photoshop Elements 5 (I still have not invested in a newer program!), I was able to tease some color and detail out of the picture. The steps I took were:

1. Straighten and crop the picture;
2. Fix and saturate color;
3. Improve the contrast and highlight/shadow detail;
4. Sharpen image;
5. Remove dust, scratches, and other blemishes; and
6. Reduce grain and other noise in the image.

The results are not perfect -- certainly not as as nice as a new picture -- but they are not too bad, especially considering the original image. It took a lot of trial and error, but short of painting on color (which I did not do) the picture is quite usable. I even received a box of cookies and brownies out of it!

I am not trained in photo restoration, and undoubtedly a professional could do more. But, if you poke around at a hobby long enough -- and I've been poking around a digital archiving for a little while -- you can get pretty good results.

UPDATE

Ellen writes in the comments, "Way to go, Rob. That's pretty cool how you can do that." Thanks, Ellen. I enjoy doing it!

Craig then adds, "Now see if you can photoshop grandma next to LBJ."


I'm not great at photo manipulation but, what the heck, here by request is Ladybird Stutz. Now, if you can identify which image Grandma's face is from -- it is from one of Grandpa's slides -- I will be really impressed.