Redditor Steven Withey‘s grandfather Derek is an 87-year-old WWII veteran who served in the Royal Navy, and a little while back he showed his grandson a badly damaged Navy photo (of a photo) of himself as a 20-year-old.
He had showed him the photo in the hopes that his technologically savvy grandson could maybe touch it up a bit, but given the massive creases and tears he didn’t have much hope. It turns out he needn’t have worried, because in this particular case, Reddit came to the rescue. Read more…
Film footage from the early 1900′s, when hand-cranked cameras were all the technology available, aren’t exactly high-quality. Choppy, jumpy, and sped-up, the people in these films look anything but natural.
One YouTuber, however, has taken it upon himself to enhance some footage from this time period and, in the process, produced something much closer to today’s standards of clarity and stability. Read more…
Natural disasters are tragic for many reasons. Assuming, most importantly, that you and your loved ones come through one such disaster healthy, you immediately begin the process of putting your life back together. And even though top priorities are probably your home, cars, critical documents, and so on, those things are replaceable; the photos that may have also been damaged or destroyed are not.
Operation Photo Rescue is an organization that understands this, and its volunteers want to do everything in their power to help. Read more…
Earlier this year, we shared some amazing work by Swedish retoucher Sanna Dullaway, who takes historical B&W photographs and colorizes them. YouTube user IColoredItForYou is another master of restoring, retouching, and colorizing, but what’s awesome about his work is that he creates behind-the-scenes videos showing how the edits are done. The above time-lapse video shows how he recently used Photoshop to colorize Margaret Bourke-White’s famous 1937 photograph, titled “Bread Line during the Louisville flood, Kentucky”. Read more…
Photo restorer Bob Rosinsky of Top Dog Imaging wrote an interesting article describing how he restored a tintype photograph from the 1870s brought to him by a client.
My standard operating procedure is to use an ultra-high resolution camera combined with a top-of-the-line macro lens to photograph tintypes. I use strobe lights to illuminate the artwork. Strobes produce “hard” light, much like the sun on a clear day. In addition to the strobes, I place a polarizer over the camera lens and polarizer gels over the strobe lights. This eliminates all reflections and enables the camera to pick up a greater tonal range along with more detail.
[...] I began the laborious process of restoration, which involved a prodigious amount of retouching.
