Photo Restoration

Memories nowadays are easily stored in devices that fit in the palm of our hands. But I feel like the more we progress in technology and memory storage, the more we are beginning to value older and "physical" ways of looking back at special moments in life. I can't deny that at times, I'd rather have a tiny polaroid than a digital photo that would get lost in my phone among memes and screenshots.

Sadly though, we can't always keep these photographs out in the open, exposed to sunlight and other elements. The best is to keep them in a photo album to make sure they will be damage free for a long time. This is where digital copies and restoration comes in.

This photo restoration was probably one of the most time consuming, yet most rewarding projects I have ever done. In total, this took about 8 hours to restore, and if I had about a week or so more to work on it, I would definitely restore it even further by adding color and fixing the lighting a little bit as well. I absolutely loved being able to see how the picture was coming together bit by bit as I kept on editing it. It was like a virtual puzzle! Very fun and rewarding challenge overall.

During this project, the only small struggle I did encounter was trying to reconstruct face elements such as the jawlines, eyes, and hairlines that were damaged in the original. But, having almost an entire lifetime of drawing faces and about 5 years of editing portrait photographs, reconstructing the face elements wasn't as big of a challenge as I thought it would be. It was just a second nature I had to tap into. I airbrushed and painted the faces until they looked as I imagine the actual face looking like.

For tools, I mostly used the clone stamp, airbrush, and paintbrush tool, followed by some smudging and blurring here and there in order to make everything look natural. I used different hardness levels of brushes, and aside from the regular circle brush, I used some splatter brushes to make colors and textures blend seamlessly. I am overall very pleased with the final result!