Introduction: Photo Restoration

Photo Restoration is the group of techniques by which we try to return a damage image or damaged sections of the image to their original luster while trying to preserve or improve the original quality. We will attempt to restore the image below:

Before

And when we are done with it we should have something a little cleaner and usable:

After

1. Restoring the Image

Let’s begin by opening our source file:

Let’s go ahead and duplicate the background layer by pressing CTRL + J (Layer Via Copy) and name it “fix” this will allow us to start editing on this new layer rather than the background original:

If your image is in any mode, like grayscale, we need to convert it to an RGB document to be able to use some of Photoshop’s more Powerful tools.

Once again let’s duplicate our layer (CTRL + J) and name it “retouch”

Select the clone tool and use a soft brush of about 17 pixels in size and set its Mode to Normal with the Opacity at 80%. We want the flow at 100% to preserve the strength of our brush.

We’re going to be using the “Retouch” layer on the parts we want to fix, but first we need to select the “fix” layer to select the part we want to use as the retouch layer.

Let us start by fixing the hair and cleaning up the background.

As you can see we are already improving the quality of the photograph as shown in the image above.

In the image above you can see all of the different strokes I painted with the clone tool. I have placed it in a black background just so it is more obvious.

Link the adjustment Layer, “Retouch” and the Fix layer and press (Ctrl+E) to merge the layers

2. Results

By adjusting further and using a host of additional tips and tricks we end up with our final image:

In this tutorial we made use of a few tools to help us remove the grain and other marks from the image as well as helping us make a cleaner and softer look for our subjects.