Restore This

A friend from church occasionally brings me old pictures to restore. I enjoy the challenge and the process of restoring the clarity to old memories. This week she brought me some old Polaroids, probably dating from the mid 1960s. Polaroid photos were an amazing product in their day, but they are not exactly archival. They fade, have color shifts, and fingerprints don't stay just on the surface, but actually get into the photo.

Here is one I was given to work on. It's not the worst of the group (I'm saving the real nightmare for a future post), but it's in rough shape. As you can see, part of the emulsion has actually stripped away on parts of the photo.

Original photo

Here is the restored version, all cleaned up and ready to be put back into the family album. (Click on photos to enlarge.)

Restored photo