Photo Restoration Part 1 (the one with writing)

My mission, if i chose to accept for this project, was to get old or damaged photos and try and restore them using various tools in photoshop, and upload them here. Well, i accepted, and i did it not one, not two, not three, not four, not six, but five times. i began this project by asking my grandma if she had any old discolored, stained, cracked, or any other sort of photos that were damaged. My grandma told me she would have to check, and then a few days later she brought me five photos with seemingly little to do, like the one above. they were mostly just discolored but once i scanned them into photoshop and did the auto color under image adjustments, it let all the cracks and little stains show through, as well as all the noise in the background. this particular photo of is of my Grandma (middle) surrounded by two of her friends, having a good time. the photo had a very orange looking tint to it, and i dealt with that using the auto color. i then saw that there was a huge problem area on the right of the photo, and just decided to crop that part out. i then used the spot healing brush to take out all the cracks on the photo that ran straight down the middle. for the mirror, i needed to use the patch tool, which was causing e trouble as it would always blur it at the same time. i used the patch tool in other places like the clothing in order to keep the pattern consistent. Ms. Turner actually had to help me with the mirror because of how difficult the patch tool was being. this was probably the most difficult of the photos because of how much there was to do with the patch and spot healing tools. as i was zoomed in on the photo i realised that there were these tiny little specks all over the photo. i got rid of them by using the noise filter and messing with some of the settings until it was just right. i realised this made the photo very blurry, and asked Ms. Turner what i could do about that. she said to then use filter highpass and set the number between two and three. this made the photo have a grey fill that cleared up the photo and so to make it not grey, under the filter settings, i set it to linear light. after doing all these things with filters, the photo was a lot more clear. the next thing i did was kind of funny. since Ms Turner posted publically that our class was doing photo restoration, word got around to news 12, and they wanted to do a story on it since some of the photos were damaged from hurricane sandy. she told us to look busy when they came and to pull up one of our best photos so if they interviewed us, we would be good to go. this was the photo with the most dramatic change and so i kept it open. the funny part was to make it seem like i was doing something, i took the dodge tool, and started outlining the mirrors edge, to give it a pop, and a shadow. i ended up not getting interviewed, but after that i was done. i then started to work on the other photos my grandma gave me, which are posted below. the rest of the photos were pretty straightforward and only needed some color correcting, so they went by pretty fast. i cant wait to show my Grandma and Poppi the photos i fixed for them as i can only imagine what they'll say!