Watch a Horribly Damaged 1903 Photo Get Expertly Fixed and Colorized

Photo restoration wizard James Berridge made this fascinating 15.5-minute video showing how he used Photoshop to restore and colorize a horribly damaged photo captured 116 years ago in 1903.

“[…] I usually don’t work with photos which require this level of restoration,” Berridge writes. “I found this horribly damaged, but very sweet, picture while trawling the Library of Congress Website. I decided, possibly foolishly, to try and restore it.

“Not much is known about this picture itself but it’s from the Library of Congress collection, dated between 1901-1903 and was in the name of ‘L M, Manning’.”

Due to the condition of the photo, this project took Berridge a whopping 20 hours of work over the span of a month to complete. You can see the result in this Instagram gallery:

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A post shared by James Berridge (@jbcolourisation) on Oct 15, 2019 at 2:18pm PDT

If you’d like to try your own hand at this restoration and colorization (and have a bunch of free time to do so), you can find the original source file on the Library of Congress website.

You can also find more of Berridge’s work on his YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.