Restoration

I honestly like how aged photos look and I have versions of these photos where more wear is shown, but the focus of the image is more refined. For drama sake, let’s look at how the customers like to remember and see their loved ones. Plus this is what Photoshop is all about, right?!

 

PLEASE Note and USE the <SLIDERS> to see Before & After images. Best viewed on a desktop!

Believe it or not, the girl on the far right was not the hardest part of restoring this image. The delicate glasses on the center lady took the longest. It was on a thick backer board and was slightly larger than 11″x17″ so scanning was a bit tricky. Which also makes scanning it in a bit trickier. I also gave the client a version with the hand written labels.

 

This beautiful lady is my grandmother. I like the aged photo better. Perhaps with a subdued crease across her throat and maybe less green, I wouldn’t touch a thing. The rest of her kids and her husband really appreciated the sepia toned, perfect young Aurelia at her 80th birthday party. Care to take a guess about the trickiest part on this keepsake? SPOILER – The subtle lapel shadowing behind the glare on the lower left.

 

The Dallas Museum of Art, like most other high quality museums, take high definition digital photos of their entire collection. They use it for cataloging, having consistent images for comparison/aging, and for reproduction on ads etc. Well in theory these images are tremendously better than the ones we take on our phones. But when an ad needed to be created for this Monet Water Lily, we noticed how off the colors were proofing. The color bars at the edge of the photos are used as a consistent guide to measure the color levels. No matter what we did, various parts of the painting looked WAY OFF.
I’m still not sure why, but it took many different color moves on different areas of the painting to make it look like the one you’ll see hanging on the wall. My best guess is the lighting set up the photographer used did not illuminate certain hues of the painting? Oh, comically, I used a provided reference from a camera phone to make the shadow and lighting references of the frame, so it wouldn’t look as flat.