Lost Senior Pic

[Mark Adams]

This is a senior pic. a friend gave me years ago. It was a wallet sized pic that I kept pinned to a cork bulletin board for years. After I moved out, my father wound up with the bulletin board in his wood shop and I stumbled on this photo after it was exposed to years of dust, sun and mutilation.

I've put probably 16 hours into this restoration/retouch off and on over thre past several years. This is my third attempt working from scratch and I'm fairly happy with the face, hair and background. The dress looks better too, but I've looked at it so much I can't see the forrest for the trees, so to speak. While I've used applications like Photoshop and the Gimp for a few years for small things like creating small graphics for websites, etc. this is my first attempt at anything like this.

Comments, suggestions, criticism...?

Mark

P.S. I did it with the Gimp.

[freelancer]

Hi Mark,

It's a beautiful picture. Nice work on the restoration.

The areas that you've fixed are slightly lighter and the bottom of the photo shows a little reflection. If you can't see them on your monitor, bring the contrast and brightness to the highest and take a look.

I'm not sure it will cause any problems. If you're going to print it, do a test print of one of those areas first to check whether the printer will pick up these slight variations.

[Mark Adams]

Okay, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "reflection" but when I boosted the dials on my display, sure enough, there was some grey scatter where detail was lost. I worked on those areas and filled them in as best I could without handpainting individual, tiny blotches. It looks pretty good on my machine, but I'm starting to blur out some detail.

See if this is any better. Feel free to snag a copy and "annotate" it to point out what I should be looking at.

I appreciate your input, and no there are no plans at this stage to print this one,
but you never know....

Mark

[freelancer]

Hi Mark,

I think it looks great. When I opened it in photoshop I saw how much work you put into this restoration and was impressed at the detail.

... I was just a tiny bit distracted by the background on the left of the photo. I see problems where there aren't any... Every challenge that I've entered here has been re-retouched after submission "to make it better."

Best regards

[Mark Adams]

I think I see what you mean about the left side of the background. I didn't really spend much time on that and I admit it shows. I was thinking about covering it with a vignette mask, but it wouldn't take much to blend the content there to make it much better. I could also help it out be cropping the left side so that the black margin that appears on her dress goes away.

If you noticed it, it's worth fixing.

Thanks.

Mark