restored photo for critique and help!

[auroraskye]

I scanned in a bunch o' photos while I was at my Granny's house and here is a simple one I worked one, wanted to get feedback. There are multiple photos that need MAJOR help.. I would like some tips on removing yellow spots/yellowed tape from photos.. Thanks so much.

The Original Photo of Grandmother

The Restored Photo of Grandmother

A Photo of My Mother Age 4, that needs fairly serious help...
I love and adore the photo of my mother there, and personally think it should be the cover of a greeting card or something

Playing with the saturation gives me some difference, but then the background is still uneven looking I prefer not to do much cropping of the edges, because the composition of the photo is near perfect in my opinion.

TIA for your feedback and suggestions. I know that the photo of my grandmother may have a few rough spots but I don't want to .. over restore.. I want it to look like an old photo, just not dirty and broken.

[johnnieB]

auroraskye, i like what you did with the grandmother photo --- great shot.

i do think that a minimal crop on your mother's picture is worth it (how adorable), and with the quickie fix that i did, including adding a sepia tone and run thru neat image, i believe nothing was lost (other than the tips of the candles), but you can fix that easily. i agree, it would make a perfect birthday card.

[philbach]

Well instead of cropping I used cloning and the healing brush plus levels to preserve the horse and the bottom of the roller skates. At the end I used neat image to remove some of the grain of the photo.

[duwayne]

A very nice black & white photograph. I also played with the crop. The left image includes the horse as a secondary object. In the right image, I cropped only the girl and cake.

No magic to fixing. Just cloning, healing and level adjustments of various parts.

[Kraellin]

aurora,

seems it might have been a better idea to put the unfinished one in a different forum; you're not getting many comments on the finished one

as for the finished one i think you did a good job. the way to view these is to NOT look at the before and just look at the after. in doing that, i find that the only thing that bugs me is not something you did but that was extant in the original. it's slightly out of focus. i'd run some sort of sharpening on this just to make it a better photo. but your work looks perfectly fine. the restorer's motto shld be, 'do no damage' and you kept to that, so, nice job!

craig

[Syd]

An adorable photo. I also prefer the closer crop. Perhaps you could do two versions. The original composition and a cropped one. I used Shadow/Highlight to even out the tones and added a Sepia layer.

Syd

[bart_hickman]

I just began to fix it up.

-For the discoloration along the bottom, just use a levels or curve adjust tool and use the set white point and set black point tools to transform the damaged colors to match the undamaged colors. This way you get to keep the original textures. Use the healing brush to touch up the boundary.
-Healing and cloning for the scratches elsewhere--I just did some of it along the top
-Channel mixer 0.3R + 0.7G. Blue channel has some crud in it, so I left it out.
-Shadow/Highlight to brighten up the shadows a bit
-High pass filter radius ~10 (can't recall exactly) then set fill to 50% and blend overlay (PSP users can just use the high pass sharpen tool)
-Color balance to make the highlights blue/cyan and the shadows yellow/red. Just using sepia makes photos look too old IMO--the cyan in the highlights gives them some life while still keeping them old-timey.
-Curve boost to luminance masked with a radial gradient to give a vignette effect.
-Noise reduction.

Bart

[auroraskye]

Thanks to all for your comments and your work on restoring the photo of my mom. Bart, thanks so much for telling me step by step what you did, I'd like to learn new tips to improve my restoration skills.

[Ying]

Hi auroraskye,
I did some fixing on your grandmother's photo, the result is attached.
The missing parts (the edges) can be restored by copying parts of the photo that look similar and moving them over - that's what I did to the ground.