Making another image

[Wendy]

Hi ...

When my parents married it was during the war and they were only allowed 12 photos ... sadly the camera broke down part way through and although they had a couple of photos take a week or two later they really didn't have a good photo of the two of them.

I took my Mum from Photo 1, the top half of my Dad from Photo 2 and the bottom half from Photo 3 ...

Then I coloured the photo to come up with No 4 ...



Wendy

[JulieM]

Wendy: You worked miracles there - the resulting portrait is lovely. I bet that one was really fun to work on...

[Paul_Kingston]

That's great, Wendy. The colouring for example is beautifully done.

One small suggestion: to my eye in the final picture your mother looks a little hunched up, and I think it's because you've taken the line of her waist to carry on down from your father's elbow. But in the original for this bit, the man in army uniform (her father?) has his arm down her side and (I think) slightly obscuring the line of her dress. I wonder if the slight un-naturalness that I think I'm seeing would be removed by altering the line of the dress at this point.

Or maybe I'm just being picky. It's a great result.

[jo]

Outstanding, Wendy! Isn't it amazing what we can do?!?!

[msbrad]

Wonderful Wendy,
I also like that you posted all the photos you used to create.
m

[CalamityJanet]

Wendy, I'm in awe! I've spent hours and hours this week trying to gain some restoration skills. And sadly I haven't got a single finished image yet. And I'm not even trying to do make a new image as you've done so beautifully. I'm going out this morning to but Katrin Eismann's book, as I've heard so many people here recommend it highly.

I have a question. I have a photo of my dad taken in 1936 when he was only fourteen. It's the earliest photo I have of him. It's printed on paper that has a lot of texture and when scanned it looks like it's printed on sandpaper! Very difficult to do any cloning, etc. I tried Matt's tutorial from his book to get rid of the texture but it didn't work very well on this photo. I also tried taking a photo of the photo and at first glance that doesn't look like much of an improvement. Do you have a favorite technique for dealing with textured paper?

[Tina_B]

Great results for a difficult task. You did a great job !
Tina

[lindajay]

Wendy! I'll never cease to be amazed at what you are able to do with a photo. Your restoration skills are so fine!

[Wendy]

Hi Janet ...

Textured paper is the very devil to work on

One thing to do is scan it several times ... rotating it a little each time on the scanner bed. Some angle are better than others ... its all to do with how the light hits the image. Another tip is to try photographing it instead of scanning.

Flora over at RetouchPro used to do some amazing stuff on textured paper but she doesn't seem to be around there anylonger but I did find this tut she suggests ... it may give you some help

http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=58

Wendy

[DebCam]

very nice Wendy. You've created a treasure there.