Venom's idea for a Mother's Day present sounded good to me. Soooo I had my dad get his grubbies on a damaged photo that my stepmother had. Spent about 3.5 hours on it so far. Whaddaya think? The original is a 4x6 photo. I scanned it to 600dpi so I had a HUGE sample to work with. Thanks Venom!

wow...nice job tofu

NICE

Awesome job on that, Tofu! How far do you plan on going with it? are you going to do some color correction, or colorize it. or were you just repairing the actual damage?

Oh ya! thats a really good job! ~ I'd like to see it in color"

Great job Tofu! Hope your mother enjoys it

Thanks for the compliments! I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out so far. I was only planning on repairing the actual damage for my stepmom. But I may keep working on it for the practice. Any suggestions from anyone?

The hardest part was the baby's face since the tear went right across the eye. Also you can't really see it at this size but there is considerable staining to the original picture. It's a reddish speckling and swipe mark. It actually looks almost like iodine stains. That was kinda tough to get rid of too (especially on the folds of the baby's dress).

The thing that I think is neat is that the original is a 4"x6" but the scan will allow her to print a much bigger photo if she wants. It still looks good as a 5x7 or even pretty good at 8x10.

looks good.

but... fix contrast and brightness!

Very nice. I'm sure she'll be thrilled. Adjust it in levels ... moving the black does it!

You might try to get rid of the whole cloudy look in the background and make it more matte. I don't know if it's supposed to be like that (as a photo backdrop, for instance) But I would try it just to see how it looks.

Gave the picture to my stepmother. The picture dates to around 1908. The picture is of her father and his siblings. The baby in the middle died from "crib death" shortly after the picture was taken. Hearing all this backstory I thought she'd really appreciate the restore work and having the photo whole again.

The reaction was basically a lack of reaction. She said thanks and that was about it. No emotion about it and no real sign of gratitude at all. I put in about 4 hours of work and there was pretty much zero reaction. Definitely was not what I expected.

Shoot Tofu. Sounds like you should just kick her ass!

What a sour lady!

is your dad canadian? he looks like a canadian on pic 1.

i had a cool idea once a while back but never got around to doing it. I was going to scan in child pictures of everyone in my family, brothers, parents, grandparents, cousins, nieces, nephews, etc. and put them all in a collage... that would make a nice present for mother's day next year - and you have almost a whole year to work on it!!!