Photo Restoration anyone?

[ByronBrant]

This is something I find very rewarding. As well as very challenging

 

[ByronBrant]

Here in one I felt was a lost cause, but gave it a shot anyways.

 

[tirediron]

Good job!

 

[Tinderbox (UK)]

Photo 4 looks really bad to me, looks like some sort of moire/pattern over the entire image.

John.

 

[ByronBrant]

The pattern was added by customer request

 

[Buckster]

It looks like a really good start, especially for all you had to do with the second set. There's still quite a lot to nitpick about them at this stage though, especially the second set.

Nonetheless, if the client is happy with them, so be it. Clients who have a personal connection to images tend to have a much less critical eye and are therefore much more forgiving than those of us who have no personal interest in them and tend to notice details that call out to us.

 

[ByronBrant]

I'm very open to what I can do to improve them. Any suggestions?

 

[ByronBrant]

 

[Buckster]

I'm very open to what I can do to improve them. Any suggestions?

Well, some of the things I noticed are, in the first, he's lost his white T-shirt, and the reconstruction of his chin to jaw doesn't look natural, but very flat and square.

In the second, there's a lot of reconstruction work that, again, just doesn't look natural to me. The splotches of lighter or darker colors on the skin of the subjects, for instance stands out quite a lot to my eye. People's skin just doesn't look that blotchy and uneven. The reconstruction of the arm on the female on the left side of the image just doesn't look like a real person's arm proportionally, and many of the shadows under chins and so on don't look right to me either. The boy's cheek looks like a chipmunk's cheek full of nuts - unnatural for a human.

It's sort of like you more often just extended the hues and brightness levels in the original images into the areas that were torn up, even when those hues and brightness levels were actually damage that needed to be cleaned up themselves. In doing so, much of it rendered flat and without believably correct 3-dimensional quality and, in some cases, losing the inherent shapes of the real-world objects they need to portray in a believable way. In restorations like this, you've really got to imagine the original quality photo and really think about how the light and shadow and shape and 3 dimensional depth of everything in it must have originally looked, and try to recreate that.

Sometimes, it's best to bring in body parts, eyes, hair or other things from other photos entirely, and then fit them into the composition appropriately, and adjust them to the correct size, dimension, color, hue, saturation, brightness levels, light and shadow. That's no easy task, but gets easier the more you do it.

What's the length of a typical person's forearm in relation to their head or hand or foot other body parts you can see? (Length of a person's forearm is about the length of the person's foot, as an example) Those are the kinds of things you've got to research and learn about human anatomy in order to convincingly reconstruct by compositing from other source images or rebuilding from scratch the missing pieces in an image like this, where so much is destroyed.

Those are my starting thoughts as I look at the images posted.

 

[ByronBrant]

Thanks for taking the time to spell that all out Buckster. It gives me another way to view them. Some of what you mention like the hues and tones are things I'm starting to see but not yet able to recreate. I have a long ways to go and much to learn. Thanks again for your input.

 

[ByronBrant]

Better? Added back the T-shirt. resized his shoulder, arm, & chin. Fixed more of the faded part of his shirt.

 

[Buckster]

Yeah, to me that looks like an improvement.

 

[Robin Usagani]

Here is one I did. I didnt have big enough scanner so I scanned it multiple times

 

[ByronBrant]

Nice job robin

 

[ByronBrant]

Here was a quick easy one