1-9 - Advanced Photoshop & Graphic Design

Quicklinks to all course lessons: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Lesson 1 sections: 1-1 1-2 1-3 1-4 1-5 1-6 1-7 1-8 1-9 1-JFF 1-IDEA

(1-9) Restoring Photos

Photoshop's healing and content aware tools are the perfect tools to restore an old photo. Often people who do photo restoration charge $75 to $150 per hour or photo to restore an image. However, knowing how to use the content aware tools in Photoshop, you've gained the skills so you can do this, too. Mastery will come with a more practice. All of the videos and resources in the optional section below will help you. Watch one or more of them. If this fascinates you, the first one is a link to Lynda.com's course on photo restoration (Lynda.com membership required to view this four hour course). All the others are from people who've share their expertise on YouTube with us.

Many of my former students have enjoyed trying out their skills on an old family photo - restoring it and sharing it with their family. This would be a great real world exercise that would have a lot of meaning for some of you. Below is a photo that one of my students restored. If you choose to do this for your first portfolio exhibit this semester, be sure to include "before" and "after" shots in your exhibit!

Photo restoration by Bret Barton - former student

I took an old family photo from my youth and restored it. This was scanned from a 35mm slide taken in 1961 (I'm the oldest boy in the photo). The slide had discolored over the years. Photoshop's powerful tools made the restoration possible.