Saturday, September 29, 2007

Restored an old photo 

I'll explain a little about this shot first. My father was about a year old when his mother and father were both murdered in WW2. His mother was murdered in a concentration camp and his father was murdered because he was a communist or something along those lines. It's all a bit of a grey area because we're not entirely sure what happened. We can only go by stories we've heard over the years.

The story continues that one of two scenarios happened on the way to the concentration camp. We've heard either my father was somehow thrown from the train in the hopes that he'll survive because they knew their fate, or the alternative story was that his mother was able to convince a guard to take her baby (my dad) and was subsequently given to a family to take care of him until he was later claimed by a relative after the war.

The below photo was probably taken a few years before her murder which we believe would have been in the mid 30's to early 40's. We know very little about her but a few years ago my sister was able to track down a relative overseas which had this photo and a photo of his father. This was pretty momentus as you can imagine because my father has never seen his parents.

The condition of the photo was pretty crap so I decided last night to try and restore it using my Cintiq interactive pen display. My first real test since buying it and I must say i'm extremely impressed. I took one look at the original photo and thought I'd be unable to do much with it, or it would be a nightmare to deal with. With the Cintiq it was a cinch. Within 2 hours approximately this photo was pretty well restored. And by the way, i'm hardly an expert in Photoshop. There is probably a million ways to have done this better than the way i've done it.

Anyway, here are the two photos. The first is the original photo as we received it and the second shot is the restored photo using Photoshop CS3 and my Cintiq.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

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