Yours Truly circa 1967

[Round Tuit]

A few weeks ago, my wife rediscovered an old photo dating from 1967 that had been ripped by one of my sons about 40 years ago and repaired with "invisible Scotch tape". She asked if I could possibly repair it. This is what it looked like:

#1


I converted the scan to B & W using a channel mixer layer which removed most of the yellowed tape damage. After adjusting the black and white points and the contrast, the patch tool became my best friend to repair the damage since CS4 doesn't have any content aware feature that I could use. A little judicious use of sharpening and blurring followed by sepia toning resulted in this restored photo:

#2


At this point, I thought that I would try my hand at colorization and went searching you tube for tutorials. There are several available but the best that I found is this one:
How to colorize a black and white photo with Photoshop - YouTube

The process is very tedious but not overly difficult. Getting the right skin tones is definitely the trickiest part. In any case, this is what I ended up with.

#3


Your comments and suggestions on this experiment will be most welcomed.

André

[Mike Buckley]

Remarkably good results especially for a first-time effort and especially on the monochrome image. I'm particularly impressed with your reconstruction of your right shoulder. Having said that, the original has its own charm and is certainly worth keeping.

[Shadowman]

Nicely done.

[proseak]

Very nice work

[Round Tuit]

Thank you Mike, John and Peter

Mike, the restoration of the right shoulder was not all that difficult when you understand how I scanned the original photo. It is in two pieces. The large one with the rip on the right side and a crease damage along the top and a smaller piece that fits in the lower left corner. I placed the two separated by about half an inch on the scanner bed and backed the pieces with black construction paper. After scanning, I selected the small piece, placed it on its own layer and moved it into place and used a layer mask to hide the white paper along the tear. I then cropped the image. That is the reason that you only see a small part of the corner piece on the first image that I posted. The restoration from that point was fairly easily done. Most of the skills required are the same as for PP with the possible exception of using the channel mixer to get rid of the yellow tape damage.

I also want to clarify that this was not my first restoration work but it was my first attempt at colorization. I am fairly pleased with the resulting coloured image except for my hair which seems a little too black.

[IzzieK]

What a handsome guy you were in your youth...I am smiling but not joking. And you did a good job.

[marlunn]

Very well done, I think showing them both of together side by side in an album would be good