I am working on a series of photographs for restoration and I would really like to hear what you think of them. I will giove you the before and the after, would love to hear what you think I might have done different, or what I did right. Honest opinions please! :) This is the before image... NOTE: All of these images were scanned in as TIFF files and saved as TIFF files, I saved them as jpegs to show you.

OK here is the after image...

I am doing these at no charge just to gain experience btw. I will post more as I finish them if you wopuld like to see...

You did a really good job here Brenda, i dont have any experience whatsoever with this kinda work. But i'd say you really cleared that up !! Excellent job here !! :o)

Can you try making the brightness a bit darker.You know,just to see.

Well I hope you don;t mind me giving a try,but it was a curiosity to try.This is just one man's opinion.

Doug I have about ten different images here if you would like to try any of them, let me know, I would be more then willing to let you have a go at it... I like the dark color of yours, but seeing as I never saw the original new, I have no idea what it might have looked like, I tried to clean up the staining and make it a bit more presntable... I have one image in particular here that looks like a painting that was torn and taped on the front! The tape is yellowed, this has got to be the most difficult out of all of them, trying to replace the shadows... I will play with this one (up above) some more and present both results. Thank you! Brenda :)

I think you did a fantastic job cleaning these up..... my only suggestion (keep in mind I'm no expert in this either) is the same as Doug's.... I feel as if it needs to be darker.... Still very faded.... if you play around with levels to boost your blacks and whites, you get more contrast and something at least closer to the original in tones...

The framing is lovely and fits the image very well; the image itself looks much better and cleaner, with nice tones. I know nothing about restoration but to me it looks like you have done well.

Yeah I kind of agree Chelle, I did like how Doug made it darker, and I was thinking about that today at work, that the original must be faded a lot after this amount of time. And darker is probably how it was originally. I am starting an album with just my restore attempts, before and after. I have some very challenging images that I am working on here. How did I happen to receive this assignment you ask? I did an image for a girl last May before we went on summer hiatus, and well this person saw what I did for her and thought of me when her Mother presented these images to her. I asked her why she thought of me, because in all honesty, the image I did for the girl in May I was not happy with, the original photo was bad off and I literally had to draw in hands and facial features because of the glare from a mirror when the flash went off. Anyway she said she thought of me because she thought I had to be some kind of perfectionist, because I told the girl I still wasn't happy with the image. :-S Me a perfectionist? She has got to be kidding! LOL! Brenda :)

Like what you have done so far.. Agree with darker as well. Know you're going to have with this one.. And of course I couldn't resist playing for a few minutes with it myself. Hope you don't mind.. Doug

No I didn't mind at all! Matter of fact I think this looks awesome! Did you do this with the contrast/brightness? :)

Ummm.. No first I did levels then curves for brightness and contrast. Then desaturated and added a toning layer. But now that I see this at work I have it too dark and too grainy. That's what I get for trying this on my laptop in bed at 3 am. Have fun with this, but a warning, it is addictive.. L Doug