This photo restoration of a girl on a horse was the largest photo so far. Measuring 390mm by 490mm, the photo had been framed and hung on a wall for decades. Originally it had been behind glass. However, for some reason, that had been broken long ago. This will have contributed to its fading.
The photo had been mounted on either plywood or MDF before framing. It was not possible to remove it, without serious damage. that’s why the decision was made to photograph the image, extract it to a digital image file that had been set up for it.
You can see in the bottom left hand corner that another photograph had been inserted between the frame and the glass on the outside, which protected the photo from sunlight and gave me an indication of what the colours should have looked like. Sadly, that didn’t extend to the horse or rider, so thankfully, the client provided some other photos to help.
Photo restoration
The other photos the client provided were snapshots and they themselves needed some restorative work before they could be used. One of them was a photo of this very photo where it hung on the wall. Unfortunately, that had been taken using a flash camera and quite a lot of the image was obliterated by the flash’s reflection off the glass.
The flash photo took some fettling to get it to exactly match with the large picture, but once done, it meant that textures and colours from it could be used to restore the original.
There was still a lot of work needed to be done, because a lot of the horse in this was underneath the flash. A lot of the photo restoration was down to digital air brush work, colourising and a bit of artistic licence to try and bring the original back to life.
The end result
The work took the better part of two weeks to complete and in the end, the finished product was about as good as I could get it.
The finished article was the same size as the original at 390mm X 490mm and 300 DPI, which made it print ready.
This really stretched my system to the limits. The finished lossless TIF file was 106Mb or 26 mega pixels.
The client’s reaction was, “That’s just how I remember it.”
Another happy customer.
Leave a Reply