In my 2023 in Review post I mentioned how restoring an image scanned from a print had been a useful exercise for me in coming to terms with the passing of my mother. I received a very kind email from Malcolm Panthaki in response to this post and he shared some of his lovely wildlife images from Bosque del Apache, a venue I have long wanted to visit in New Mexico. He also mentioned that he had been asked by a friend to try and restore an image of their late father, shared the image and asked if I had any advice.

I have written previously on how precious family photos are and how the value only increases with passing time. The deluge of digital images is a double edged sword as individual images are easier to preserve but can become harder to access if not printed. I still have negative files full of old images (my father’s and my own) that I could scan and print but they cannot be backed up like digital files so are at risk of physical loss. Fortunately my sister scanned a large number of my father’s negatives so we have a number backed up digitally. Photos from the past may only exist as well worn prints and while these flaws are more easily forgiven when holding a print, in a digital scan they can be distracting. Digital tools can go a long way to restoring damage and in the hands of an expert the results are little short of amazing.

Photo restoration is not something I have much experience with so felt the best way of offering advice to Malcolm was to do what I could and share back a layered PSD file showing my steps. Basically this consisted of some clone stamp work, healing brush and generative fill.

As usual, after doing this, an article appeared in my news feed around the new neural filters in Photoshop, one of which is the Photo Restoration filter which is still in Beta. This did a reasonable job with some of the smaller defects but struggled with the larger creases so offered no advantage over what I had already done. The other one that interested me was the Colorise filter. This did a reasonable job of returning some colour to the image and if masked to the subject and improved with some local colour adjustments looked reasonable.

Having shared the image back to Malcolm he conveyed the family’s thanks and appreciation. I had felt a bit invested in the image as the subject reminded me of a friend/colleague of my father’s who had a son of about my age so we had spent some time together growing up. I asked if the family minded me using the image for this blog post and they graciously agreed.

Malcolm wrote to me;

They are fine with you using the image in a blog. 

Joe Gallegos was a WWII veteran and raised his family of 4 kids in lovely New Mexico, home of the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Reserve. 😊”