Some times when it comes to a re-edit it is more of a restoration effort. Last week i helped an image my dad had taken on colour reversal film that i had found in a box.
Recently I was given a load of prints that needed to be restored. I would say one of the major advantages of modern digital photogrphy is that if an image ages or gets damaged you can make a new print easily. With the old analogue of history, if i aprint was damaged it was damaged and you could only make a duplicate if you could find the negative. Some people stored prints, protecting them in photo albums from sticky finger prints and clumsly people. Other people stored them in a shoe box.
The prints i was loaned were kept in a shoe box and I had to hide my pain.
The one i have chosen for today is of my Mother and Father-in-Law with a baby whose identity i am not sure of.
The image has been ripped and has quite a few scraches and dust marks as well as a finger print on the bottom right and a strange blob of discolourzation.
I scanned the image and went to camera raw just to make some minor adjustments to the black point and white point as well as some capture sharpening and finally cropped.
After camera raw i imported the image into photoshop. I duplicated the layer and began working on the tare on the right. I used primarily the clone tool with an opacity of 50% on the duplicated layer. I work switching form the differnt sides of the tare sampling and then cloning. When I got to the face of the baby, i moved to the heal tool and then cloned afterwards. All the editing was done at 100%, zooming out from time to time.
With the tare removed I then moved onto the dust and scratches cleaning the image in the same way as the tare.
I also wanted to remove the area of colourization. I did this by creating a Hue and Saturation adjustment layer and lowered the saturation and raised the lightness. I then added a layer mask and blended the adjustment into the image.
Once the manual work was done i then wanted to approach the toning of the image. I duplicated the layer and added a small blur. Once blurred i changed the blending more to overlay and then lowered the opacity.
Next I added a saturation adjustment layer and lowered the saturation and added a slight sepia tone to mimic the original.
The image is finished . I really like the edit. it was quite smooth but i did make mistakes when i removed the tare the first time. Since i was working on a duplicated layer it meant i could reverse and start again. I am going to print the image and show it to my in-laws and also find out who the baby is.
Let me know what you think.
Aperture64 
Impressive. I have a few like this. I must give it a go.
Give it a go it is quite forefilling when you see it complete.
Nicely done – I have fixed a few like this before, including some of my grandfather in his army uniform, which were badly faded. I agree this is a definite positive with digital photography. The only downside is that people don’t tend to print the pictures in the first place!
Your right people don’t tend to print pictures anymore, the curse of mobile tech email and social meida seems to be eating away at the print. Then again most people dont keep their digital pictures either, just upload them to facebook from their phone and camera then delete them.
Thanks for the comment, I am pleased you enjoyed my work.