Restoring a Photo of a Family Friend

This post won't be a typical quick tidbit, but I though some of you might like to see me restore an old photo.  This won't be a full tutorial, just a demo.  There are plenty of resources on the web for restoring photos.  Just Google any of these steps.

First I scanned the photo at the maximum resolution available to me (600dpi) to get as much detail as possible.  I also scanned it to a TIFF file, for maximum flexibility editing.

As you can see, I have a bit of work ahead of me.

Next, I loaded the photo into Adobe Lightroom, cropped, and adjusted the white balance.

Now the fun starts, getting rid of those nasty spots. I decided to look for one of the web resources for restoring old photos, as mentioned above.

I used the Spot Healing Brush to remove the isolated spots by the car's rear window and the one on the lawn.  Super easy for those.  Just a point and click for each.

The others will be a bit more work.  I used combinations of many healing tools in Photoshop to remove the other spots, including the Patch Tool, Spot Healing Brush, Healing Brush, and Clone Stamp.  I even selected some spots and did Replace Colors to replace the rust colors with nearby colors.

Next in line is some exposure adjustments to add some contrast and take care of those extra-bright, blown-out areas.  I started to work with Photoshop, but decided Lightroom might work better for me.  First, some some Highlight, Shadow, Contrast, White and Black Point adjustments, plus a bit of Clarity.

Sky and top of the car are still too bright for me, so back to Lightroom.  I used a Graduated Neutral Density Filter to address the sky, a Radial Filter for the top of the car, and a Targeted Adjustment Brush for the small bright spot next to his right shoulder.

Well, the exposure seems much better, but these adjustments exposed how rough the photo is.  Since the colors are pretty bad, decided to try a black and white first.  Back to Photoshop as I want to try to clean up that sky first.  First, I used the Spot Healing Brush to remove a bunch of specs from the sky.

Much better.  Now for the black and white conversion.  I used Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.  Brought down the highlights a bit and added a little contrast.

And finally, the color version.  Wasn't sure I was going to get any semblance of a good result.  Photoshops Auto Color got me most of the way there.  Then, I went back to Lightroom and added the Neutral Density Filter, and added the blue color.