Renewed and Refound

By: Nia Braccidiferro

When I first heard about this project, I thought I knew a lot about the retouching tools in Photoshop, but I was wrong. There are so many tools that I hadn’t heard about before. I haven’t retouched photos in a long time, so I was a bit rusty with my abilities. For all four of the photos, I used the Spot Healing Brush, Healing Brush, and Patch Tool. I experimented to see which one created the most realistic effect. After I applied a healing/patch tool, I needed to recolor the photo, just for fun, to test the waters. I recolored the climber’s uniform from blue to green and the garden statue from tan to red. I didn’t find the need to recolor anything in the rowers’ photograph or the photograph of the couple. For those pictures, I simply used the Healing Brush Tool and Patch Tool to fill in the gaps that were ripped. I am very proud of how realistic they look now. For the photograph of the couple, after I filled in the gaps, I pressed Auto Tone and it corrected the color/tone of the photo from a dusky-like color to a normal daylight tone. Then I duplicated that layer and set them to Multiply to darken the photograph and make it look more realistic to the viewer. In the end, the first two photographed before and afters were 6 by 2, had RGB color and 72 resolution. The last two before and afters were 26 by 10, had RGB color and 72 resolution. I enjoyed this project and I hope to complete and restore more photographs in the future.