Old Photo Taken around 1910

[Highlander363]

Hi Folks,

Here's my latest challenge which I got from my sister, it's a picture taken of two ladies outside a cottage in Fishertown in Cromarty in the North of Scotland, here is the original:

Granny-Margety-Original-Web-1.jpg

Here is it after my efforts at restoration, I'd be grateful for views and advice on how to improve it even more if anyone has any!

[spotter]

The whites look blown out.
There needs to be less hardness to them which you could achieve using curves to sample from the image in the darkest and lightest areas .
The retouching itself looks good.

[0lBaldy]

Does she want BW or Sepia?

Is it a true restore where you need all the dead image space or can you crop?

A levels... setting the Gray, Black, White points... made it almost completely BW with just a bit of yellow left in the face and a few other places which was taken care of with a Hue/Sat adj layer.. a tiny bit of sharpening was added... then for the Sepia the resident Sepia action was used

[Bullah]

I used the clone tool, cut and pasted parts of it to square it up a bit, and did some curves to bring it out somewhat. I didn't want to go overboard with it as I liked it as an old photo.

[Southbay]

Nice mood to the original. Some fill, cloning, high pass, selenium brown tone.

[Kraellin]

i like that, southbay

[Southbay]

^^ Yeah, thanks. I generally lean to a "relaxed" interpretation.

[Highlander363]

Thank you all very much for your hints, tips and advice.

Regards

Kenny

[paulus]

been dying to try out content aware fill on a picture like this - so I indulged myself - not sure if its any good

*Edit second version - noise reduction and cropped - really like the cropped version above.

Cheers
Paul

[Highlander363]

Just watched a video on content aware and it seems to be a very powerful tool! Unfortunately it's included on CS5 and I've only got CS4! Bah! Humbug.

[paulus]

Hi Highlander,

I suspect I've seen the same video (got very excited so looked at quite a few)
- content aware is excellent for an image like this cuts down the work quite a lot.

However I'm finding its not quite as good as shown in some of the Adobe vids
- You sometimes have to fill a few times as it samples from different places and sometimes it fails completely.

When I used it on the image I only used it on the background - no door frames, steps, or people - just the wall and ground

Cheers
Paul

[aartist]

I like how OlBaldy cropped the photo.

[Kraellin]

i would remind those that are going for a true, archival restore, that you are taking the image back to when it was taken, so leaving the aging coloring is not correct, unless the original had sepia to begin with.