Old torn photo - new member

[joelhutto]

This is my first time to post here. Someone in the family has gone through and torn about 4 old photos of my great grandmother in half. One particular photo has a rare pose of her with my great grandfather smiling candidly at one another, but the tear goes right through both of their faces and through his eyes. There are also some other flaws to the right of her face where someone used tape to put the photo back together. I have another photo taken within a few years of the same couple, so I know what they look like. Can anyone give me an idea as to what is the best way of restoring this? As you can see the first photo is the one in need of restoration, the 2nd shows what they actually look like.

Regards
Joel

[Jimbob121]

Here is my try after 10 Mins... I grabbed an Eye off of another picture, and pasted it on yours. Did a little cloning and masking. ( And some desaturation ) The opacity around the gentlemans eye still needs some work, but its a start. You may be able to find a better eye or use a digital image of your own looking in the proper direction ?

[joelhutto]

I will tell you, that you did a fantastic job on everything else on the photo, the eye however scares the bejeezes out of me. LOL . What software do you use for working on your photos? This is all new to me and I want to know what I should try and get. I have a few different photo softwares, but nothing seems to do what I want it to.

Joel

[0lBaldy]

Joel, welcome to RetouchPRO

What retouching software do you have? This will help focus the tips to the programs you have available to work with.

I use Photoshop Version 7, but any program that can clone or heal or paste to layers and use masks should work fine.. GIMP is an outstanding Free program that does all that.. plus a bunch more.. found here

Keep in mind that whatever is shown to you here is done on the small low resolution sample you provided.. when you work on the copy of the original high resolution picture, it will be much better quality.

On your low res sample I did some Cloning and Healing along with some scratch and dust removal and eye replacement from the attached (copied eye, pasted, free transformed to fit, masked, adjusted color)

[Jimbob121]

Hey Joel,
Yes the eye is a bit off
I use photoshop cs3

[joelhutto]

The ones I have on this computer are PhotoMAX Pro and HP Photosmart Essential 3.5, but I do not think either of them give me the ability to bring in objects or stuff like that. All I have ever been able to do was manipulate tone, brightness, colors etc.

Joel

[philbach]

Well one technique that can help in torn photos is to select the top half of the picture right above the tear and then copy that to a new layer. Then use the move tool to bring the top layer down to cover the tear. Thats all I did here, nothing else and it can get you started.

[chillin]

I would select the tear, move the selection above or below it, copy, paste, move in place & use a stamp tool to randomize texture.

[Kraellin]

you need better software than that, joel.

and welcome to RP.

if you want really top-end software, get photoshop. it's pricey, but very, very good. if you are more on a budget or just learning and want something a bit easier to work with to start, get paint shop pro. and if you have no budget at all, but still want something good, get 'the gimp'. it's an open source program (free) and really quite good. there are some good discussions in the software forum on the differences in those various programs.