I'm restoring an old photo of my mother, however, the top half of it needs to be move toward the left to line it up with the bottom half. Can someone please tell me how it can be done. Thanks.


Gerald McClaren

Gerald that very nice photo of your mother needs a lot of work. I would recommend that you scan it at a higher resolution and resubmit it. I am sure you will get a lot of help on this site. check out THIS SITE (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4398) for information on the proper size for submitting files to retouch pro.

To answer your question is to make a selection around the lower part of the nose that was moved and copy that to a layer above. Then use the move tool to place the nose in the correct position and use the eraser on this layer to remove nose elements that don't belong or look right.

Once you've aligned the two secions with the help of Philbach's instructions, the heavy work starts as he says.

I healed the tears and scratches with the patch tool, the healing brush and the clone tool.

I extrapolated the missing parts, but other pictures of your mother from which to borrow would help make the picture more accurate and make your job easier.

Good luck! :bigthmb:

Pierre

I decided to try a color version. Of course I'm the skin tone and the shoulder are only guesses.

By the way, is that hairdo from the 40's?

Pierre

Pan Pan, the restoration on my mom picture was awesome, that was the way she had looked in her twenties. What method did you use to add color to the photo? You had done a tremendous job . I like the color of her dress, it matches her earrings. Yes, that hairdo was from the late forties. This is the only picture of my mother in the family. I thank all of you guys for giving me so much information. I am new to photoshop. Now, I've just got to put everything together and do one myself. Thanks again guys.

Gerald McClaren

Hi Gerald.

There are many techniques to add color to a black and white photo. I'm lazy so I always try the easiest one first, i.e. image>adjustments>match color in Photoshop. It works well most of the time.

I put every feature of the image on a separate thread: skin, eyes, mouth, hair, eyebrows, dress, jewelry. I searched Google Images for "black woman face" and selected some images that seemed to have skin tone similar to your mother's. I used a different one for the hair, for the jewelry and so on. On those photos, I very loosely selected the colors I wanted to match onto a separate layer (no need to be finicky during this step because we're only sampling the colors, not the features of the source image.). Then I used match color to match that source layer to the one in your mother's image. I set the mother-image layer's blend mode to color after the match. Finally I added color accents as required; for example I added dark brown accents to the hair and to the eye pupils. It's important to add color even to the darkest and lightest features. For example I color matched the dress to a white tee-shirt.

I give detailed instructions on color match in this post (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?p=96899#post96899).

I hope this helps. Don't hesitate to ask if you need clarifications.

Pierre