This holiday I got the chance to give a wonderful gift ... which I almost didn't take. Several months ago my aunt asked me to scan and restore a picture of my grandfather taken in 1945, just as WWII was ending. He served in Her Majesty's Royal Navy throughout the war and survived the sinking of his ship SIX TIMES. In this photo, he is about 25 and my mother was just about a year old. As you can see, the image was heavily damaged during one of the family trips to Australia.


So I scanned it at a very high resolution, front and back and gave back the original - which was promptly misplaced. So here I am with the only copy of a family heirloom and smack dab in the middle of holiday rush. I kept putting the restoration off. I knew it was a LOT of work ... hours and hours. But finally on Christmas morning after the gifts were opened, my sister was napping on the couch and my daughter was absorbed in her new Wii game. We weren't due at my Grandmother's for a few hours, so I decided to try to get this one last gift done. Granddad passed away a few years ago — on December 15th — so this time of year is hard for my Nana. Even if I couldn't get it done, I would at least have tried to keep my promise.

I used Photoshop CS5's new content aware fill command to do 90% of the crack removal. The secret to good results with this tool is to make small, precise selections. The tool works by examining the surrounding areas and fills the selection with what SHOULD be there. If you give it too much information to chew on, you get a lot of random junk in the fill. The more precise you are, the less cleanup work. So make a small selection followed by Shift+F5 (the keyboard shortcut for the fill box. It is set to content-aware by default) and repeat — a lot. This wiped out the cracks and did a great job of maintaining the canvas-like texture of the original print. That part took about 30 minutes. I did a little manual patching down in the lower right hand corner where that big rip is, but that was about it for crack fixing. I was just floored by how FAST I was able to do the bulk of the work. In earlier versions, this is the part that would have taken hours of very careful patching and cloning. This little feature is one of the BEST additions to CS5, in my opinion.

I choose not to restore the edges of the image. I wanted it to still look "old," but I did make them a bit more regular and made sure his face was completely unobstructed.

Next, I moved onto repairing the tone and sharpness of the image. I used two curves layers for this part. The main curve restored the balance in the highlights, neutrals and shadows and the second curve was set to screen and used to lighten just his face. (You can see how to do both of these steps in this tutorial.) Looking at it now, I need to go back and balance the toning a bit more where the big crack was down the center ... but that would just be another curves layer with a mask to equalize the lighting.

To add sharpness, I used a high pass layer. This technique provides results like an unsharp mask, but gives you much more flexible control. To create a high pass sharpen layer, duplicate the background layer. The use Image>Adjustments >Desaturate to remove all the color. To turn this grayscale layer into the flexible sharpening machine, go under filter menu>other> highpass. Adjust the sliders to until you can clearly see the edges ... like so.

Then change the blend mode on the layer to one of the contrast modes ... usually overlay or soft light. Adjust the opacity as needed for the degree of sharpening you want. For this image it was set to Overlay at 76%. I used a layer mask to reduce the effect around the edges and really make Grandpa stand out from the background. You can create copies of this layer to increase the sharpening effect. It also adds contrast and helps provide depth.

The very last step was a dodge/burn layer to darken the edges. Create a new layer and set the blend mode to soft light and reduce the opacity ... in this case to 65%. Paint on the layer with white where you want to lighten (dodge) and black or gray where you want to darken (burn). Since this is on a layer, rather than directly changing pixels, you can simply delete it if you make a mistake or adjust the opacity. I burned the background a little and the darker parts of his suit.

The creamy paper behind the image is a stock image from istockphoto.com.

Here's the before and after.


and here is my Nana with her love. She was so enchanted to see his face again. She stopped several times and just looked lovingly at him. I picked out this frame with the sailor knots and I think the two belong together. It was worth every minute I spent to see her so happy! Truly, the best gift for both of us.