One of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on bringing up this site is the restoration of Fay Viosca Martin’s family album of 126 photos. In the gallery you’ll find two versions of the family album, one contains the original scans, and the other has the restored photos.
Here is an example of a completed restoration. Notice the repaired folds.
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Before restoration |
After restoration |
Restoring all of the pictures took six months. The process was quite time consuming.
- Gently and minimally clean the pictures to remove old glue and rubber cement that mess up the scanner bed.
- Very gently remove old paste and dirt from the front finish if it obstructs the picture in a way that can’t be corrected in photoshop.
- Perform a scan at a high enough resolution to guarantee decent 8 X 10 pictures (that means 5 minute scans per picture on an expensive flat bed scanner).
- Crop each image carefully to remove the white border.
- Restore each photo in photoshop to remove/repair scratches, dings, rips, bleaching.
- Sharpen the images.
- Create headlines, captions, and keywords in each image file documenting date, location, event, etc.
- Finally, create low resolution variants for the web, and upload photos to the gallery.
This was a lot of work!
Here are a few more examples to entice you:
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Before restoration |
After restoration |
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Enjoy!
Randy V.
Restoration of Fay Martin’s Album Complete