25 April 2014

Minor photo restoration

This is a photo of my mother and her sisters in Mexico. With this one I started by removing the scratches and spots as always. Then I began to selectively correct the contrast in layers. I created a layer and selected all the washed out white areas and brought some of the detail back. Then by selecting different areas on the photo I was able to adjust them individually until they all worked together. This was such a cute photo of them and now I can give them and even cuter version of the photo.

23 April 2014

Severely Damaged Photo restoration

This photo was approximately six hours of restoration. I started with the background. A solid background is the easiest to repair. After repairing the cracks there was discoloration and tail-tail signs of the restoration in the background. So I used a fill with very little opacity to help blend the background. This would not be an option if the background had any sort of pattern. Solid background are a gem as a result. That's where the easy part ended. In the most severely damaged part of his hair  I had to use a healing patch from another cleaned up portion of his hair that matched as closely as possible. Then blending is makes it look normal.

The rest of the restoration was pretty straight forward healing and cloning, keeping a close eye on shadows and lines that need to be maintained. Then a little selective color adjustment and some added film grain and I have a completely restored school photo of my dad.

21 April 2014

Restored photo to Art piece

This is the original photo of my grandmother Mary Ellen (Hayes) Roe. This took a lot of hours of work to clone and heal all the little spots of damage in the photo and remove the writing on her shoulder


Here is the photo part way through the restoration. As you can see there are still little specs in the photo. So I continued to clean up the photo and balance the levels.
 
Once the photo was cleaned up I began the fun part of recoloring the photo. By selecting each portion of the photo I wanted to recolor and then choose the "Hue/Saturation" option to create a layer. I could then adjust the Hue and Saturation until I got the desired colored. This is the best option especially when working with the face. However, you can also create again a layer with each new color and set the color using a brush and color in the area you desire (this was what I did for the shirt), this option is tricky and not always user friendly.

 

Here is the final result of a completely restored and recolored photo of Mary Ellen (Hayes) Roe. This is one of my favorite photos of her. I believe she was about 15 years old in this one.
 
For photo restoration contact me at amygennut at gmail dot com



07 April 2014

New fun tool on Ancestry

This is really cool. With the new tool on Ancestry.com you can create "Story" pages of your ancestors from the photos and documents that you have collected. So far it looks like it does a pretty good job of telling the story from the data. Again though what you put into it is what you will get out of it.

Here is the "Story" for my great grandmother Mary Joann (Williamson) Woolsey

Also on my dad's side of the family is my 3rd great grandfather Curtis Grubb Beeson A confederate Civil War Veteran. Though there is much more to his story that I have at home on his computer, Ancestry.com has put together his story as I have entered it into their data base. What it doesn't show are the pictures I have gathered of the Beeson property and graves. He lost the Beeson property after the war as his records that proved he was the owner of the land were burned during the war. Though he was wealthy and unfortunately owned slaves, he died a poor man not long after the war ended.

This is pretty cool. I will have to make efforts to put more into my Ancestry data base so that I can compile more complete stories of my ancestors.

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