Restoring Memories

I was asked to restore and enlarge some wedding photos by a friend from church. I have a habit of saying "yes" before I find out what I'm getting into, but sometimes that's what makes it fun. What I got to work with were some old 126 Instamatic prints with the usual dust spots and a fairly severe color shift. The Kodak 126 Instamatic cameras used a square format producing small 3 1/4" square print. I was asked if I could make 5x7s from these. Gulp!

To crop to a vertical 5x7, I would first have to add to the left side of two of them because they were framed so far off center. I copied and pasted content from the right side of the photo to add to the left, and then used the clone tool to smooth the transition between the added content and the original photo.

Next, I corrected both the exposure and the colors. This improved the look of the photo, but also brought out all the dust spots, smudges, and scratches from the original prints. I ran them all through the NoiseWare program to get the majority of the spotting down to a manageable level, and them used the clone tool to clean up the rest. Once I got the first one figured out, the other three were done using the same formula, and they went much quicker. I've ordered the prints, and I think at the 5x7 size they should be able to pass muster. (Click on photos to enlarge.)