My mother and her cousin have been collecting and scanning old family photos and then putting them up on a picasa web album to share with their family through ancestry.com. It has been a really fun project for them and interesting for all of us to see our family history come alive.

Some of the photos are in pretty good condition, however, most of them have some degree of fading, mildew spots, and folds and tears. When I get a free second, I like to stretch my photoshop skills and attempt to restore one of the pictures. This one was labeled Happy Hollow and a quick google search turned up this interesting site of other family photos from Happy Hollow. I’m not sure what the 1822 is, because it’s obviously not the date! I would say at the latest it’s from 1895.

Here’s the original. The two biggest problems, the color shift and the mildew spots were taken care of with one stroke by using the channel mixer to discard the blue channel from the RGB info and checking the monochrome box to bring it back to a true black and white. I also ran it through Topaz Labs Adjust filer to smooth out the grain and reduce the dust and scratches. I also used both a curves and levels adjustment layers to increase the contrast and increase the tone range. I have lost some edge detail around the faces in the center of the picture. Working on figuring out how to get it smooth without losing too much detail.