Restoring a Vintage Photo

I found some scans of old photos that I had on my computer and decided to try my hand at restoring one of them. I had attempted some of this type of thing before, but not really to this extent. I walked through several lessons of Jessica Sprague's awesome online class This Old Photo which helped me immensely. For those of you who have a shoebox full of old photos that need to be preserved (you know who you are), I highly recommend this class. There are four lessons, along with a couple of bonus ones, and they are fairly short and easy to work through. Jessica does a really awesome job of explaining all the steps without getting overly technical.

I found a special family photo, taken probably when I was 7 or 8 years old. (We won't say how long ago that was.) I'm wearing a clown costume that belonged to my grandfather when he was a boy, and has been passed through my mom's side of the family for years. Quite a number of the children and grandchildren on that side of the family have worn it at one time or another!

Here is my "before" photo:

You can see that it has faded quite a bit and there are a lot of white splotches where either the photo got wet or perhaps got stuck to another photo.

Here is my "after" photo:

Quite a difference, isn't it? I won't go so far as to call myself an expert at photo restoration, but it's definitely an improvement. This should also illustrate the point that it is so important to digitize your old photos before they are beyond repair. It's the best kind of "memory keeping" - even if you aren't a scrapbooker!