While I am working to make my business bigger and bigger, I am currently employed at Howard's Art & Frames on the Dual Hwy. in Hagerstown, MD. At the store we get many requests to do photo restorations because custom framing and old photos just go hand in hand. Restoring photos however, is not something the store itself does, but I do and it is something I enjoy doing. I like old photos and I like bringing them back to life if they have been damaged. So, between working and finishing school, I have been doing many photo restorations on the side, but I have never had one quite as challenging as this one. I figured this would be the perfect way to start out my blog. These photo restorations are what helped get my business started and it seems fitting for it to be my first blog post.

Below is the original photo I had to work with. It is pretty clear what the flaws are: giant yellow stain, her hand and dress have a huge chunk missing, and little critters have been munching away at it creating tons of tiny white spots.

I started by taking care of the easy parts first, which were the spots. It was tedious but not terribly challenging. When I zoomed in on it the first time, I realized how many spots there actually were.

After clone stamping and spot healing my little heart out I moved on to some more clone stamping with adding the dress in the missing places. After I was done with that, I was pretty happy with how it was coming along so I took a screen shot of the before and after as it stood so far.

Next was the fun part of adding in the hands. I went through a ton of my photos trying to find hands and arms that would work with the woman's pose and body. After finding several options and deciding what would and would not work I adjusted colors and masked and all kinds of stuff to get the new limbs to look as legit as possible. When I was finally happy with it, after many hours of work, I sent it off to be printed and you can see my results below.

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