Friday, February 08, 2019

Another Photo Restoration

Shauna, my daughter, had no idea that I had recently done some scanning of old photos, but synchronicity is what it is, and she asked me to scan an old battered photo of her maternal grandfather when he was a soldier in WW2.



As you can plainly see, there were a number of problem areas, namely the two big blemishes on both the left and right. That's in addition to many splotches and scratches.

I thought the best thing to do would be to crop away the big offending areas since they weren't crucial to the photo. Then I cleaned up much of the rest of the photo and converted it to plain b&w which I think it was before it yellowed. I judge this partly from the yellowed back of the photo which was also very discoloured.

So I am going to leave it as a b&w. It's certainly not a modern, well-taken  photo, but it has been salvaged to some degree, and we now have a digital record that won't deteriorate further.



It was also a very small photo, so I have enlarged it and printed it as a 4x6.

But look at the back.



Obviously, he was written to his sweetheart, the woman who would become Sue's mother, when he was away soldiering. But we don't know where he was at the time.

8 comments:

Jenn Jilks said...

Ah, it is sweet.
My late mother wrote to a lot of soldiers, her mother had a group home for teen girls, and they had visitors. I'll never know who they are!
Good work.

Marie Smith said...

What a treasure! Great work!

Joanne Noragon said...

Well done, all around.

Mage said...

It's much improved. Will it sharpen any further? For something so very tiny, it came out well.

Vicki Lane said...

What a treasure!!!

William Kendall said...

He reminds me somewhat of my late uncle.

John said...

I think you've done a great job restoring that photo. It looks good. My grandfather was in the army during WWI. He went over the top at the Somme and came home to tell the tale. He was wounded later in the conflict, however. I have a photograph of him in his unform. It has white stripes on the sleeves which all the wounded servicemen had to show they were unfit for duty. It's nice to have these types of photo to look back on.

Beatrice P. Boyd said...

It’s very nice to have vintage family photos and the cleanup worked well, John.