Please help with fixing photos.

[jibberjabber]

I have been working on restoring/color correcting my family photos. I've come accross a couple that I'm not sure how to deal with. One is an old color photo of my dad, grandfather and great uncle. The other is an example of a few photos that sort of have a "white-out" effect on them. Any help would be greatly appreciated also if you could jot down some quick pointers on how you did the work, that would be great! I'm still fairly new to photo restoration and just now getting acquainted with Photoshop CS4.

[TommyO]

jibberj,

Welcome to RetouchPro.
The image of the boy in his pj's/Santa getup appears to have been flawed when taken, not a result of time (well not completely anyway). It's typical of those bright flash bulbs, will a bit of incorrect exposure. So, you may not be able to repair it altogether. However, you can improve it somewhat using various techniques described in other threads here on RetouchPro. You'll just have to try them and see which works best for this image. Sometimes a combination of several techniques, with a little masking, will work best. Just don't go too far. The goal is to restore the image to its original condition, not make a new/clear photograph out of it.

The other image will likely be an easier, although time consuming repair. The small damage will go quickly using the healing brush (or similar). The tears can be repaired with cloning. Go slowly, work in small pieces, working from the good edge moving toward the center of the tear. It will get more difficult near the boys stomach, as there isn't much to pull from. However, stomachs are fairly generic. So, you could copy/paste another childs stomach into this image and adjust as required. Same goes for one or more of the shoes. The other areas should clone easily, as there is plenty of good data to pull from.

[jibberjabber]

Thanks for the info TommyO, I'll have a look around this amazing website and see what I can do.