“Volunteers don’t get paid, not because they’re worthless, but because they’re priceless.” Sherry Anderson

So you want to lend a hand? Lend your talents to something worthwhile? Is your talent, or passion, photo restoration? Then a great organization like Operation Photo Rescue may be just the thing you need! They certainly need you! Can you imagine going through a devastating natural disaster, hurricane, tornado, flood, losing so much, maybe even your home and loved ones? I can’t and hope I never do. I hope you never do, as well. But it all would be made even worse, somehow, if I lost pieces of my past, my heritage, in the form of heirlooms and photographs. I may not be able to do much to help with the loss of someones home, but I can help with the loss of photographs! It’s a small thing, but may go a long way to helping someone feel things will be okay again. I can’t encourage people enough to join in this worthwhile effort! However, before you sign up and start requesting photos to restore, there are a few things I’d like to encourage for the best possible outcome for everyone involved!!

My first effort for OPR was, pretty much, a disaster. Referring both to the condition it was in and the lack of skill on my part to repair it. It was a photo of a couple, judging from what little I could see, ca. 1940 or so. The water damage was horrendous and there was very little actual information left in the photo. In other words, there was nothing left even to separate into color channels. Large water voids slashed through the image, vertically, encompassing at least 90% of the picture. The couples faces, to all intents and purposes, were non-existent. I could see the approximate placement of an eye here, where a mouth may have been there, but that’s all. I ended up, basically, darkening it a little, to try to bring out what little information was there, but it stills looms large as my most epic FAIL. I do believe I could do a better job with it, now, but at the time, I had no business working on that picture.

That being said, please learn this lesson from me: Know, and respect, your limits!! I encourage, no beg, you to request photos you know without a doubt you can handle! This is an effort to help people regain their precious photos of their loved ones, not an exercise to challenge your skills! I also submit to you that if you take on photos that are at your skill level, your skill level will eventually grow, naturally! In fact, when you first start, may I suggest you request photos that almost seem too easy! Because, as anyone who does photo restoration should know, damage likes to hide in photos! Only when you put it into Photoshop and zoom in nice and tight do you begin to see all that’s really there, lurking in the background! Speaking of backgrounds, get your feet wet (bad pun) with water damage by choosing a photo where the water damage is all, or nearly all, in the background. You’ll therefore get used to working on that particularly insidious form of damage on an area that’s not of paramount importance, such as a persons face! You don’t know how many times I’ve read volunteers posts with some sort of variation on the theme “What was I thinking when I chose this one?!” That’s more stress than anyone needs to put on themselves, especially when chances are good that there are photos available with more minor damage than the one they chose.

Remember, the first rule of photo restoration is always to restore the photo back to the original, or as close to that state as possible! Something I discourage strongly in the restoration of photographs is “painting”. Please, please, don’t do this, but if you absolutely must, keep it to a minimum!!! Okay, if you have a reference photo to work from, and you also happen to be Fay Sirkis, great!! Paint away! However, if you’re lucky enough to have a reference photo, you don’t need to paint! You can composite, which is better than painting, any day!!! Why is that? Because when you composite pieces of a photo into another photo, at least it’s going to have the same look and feel! You may have to work a little (or a lot) of magic to make it “fit”, but at least it will still be a photo! Painting in a photo will always look like just that, a painting!! You will not make it look like a photo, trust me! If you have the skills to do this, you are very, very famous and your name is probably Bert Monroy! I’ve seen some horrible cases where well intentioned, wonderful people have painted faces on photos, in some cases the photo was more than easily fixed without painting, as in it still had tons of information left to repair. Not only did the painting look totally fake, but the persons doing the painting had no concept of the techniques needed to paint, especially faces, but also no knowledge of basic human anatomy (I may have the concept of anatomy down, but I can’t paint worth squat)! It breaks my heart that people will get a photo back of their child, for example, and it will be, virtually, a bad painting of a stranger! The people who attempted these photos, while possessing the hugest, kindest hearts on the planet, were way outside of their skill levels! I have a couple OPR photos where I did, actually, paint a little in, myself. In one instance, I needed to totally repair/replace a sport coat on a gentleman. Now, while I will never, and even though the Mom said to never say never, I feel fairly comfortable saying, again, NEVER paint someone’s entire face in, you might catch me painting in a wrinkle, or a shadow, especially on the less consequential areas of photos, like sport jackets. I actually bought a stock photo of a jacket that was close to what I needed, but had to “tweak” some things. That photo remains, to this day, a huge embarrassment to me and it will not be found in any gallery, portfolio or other example of my work. Even though it’s the best I could do with what I had, and in the time allotted, it’s nowhere in the realm of my best work. The most important thing about the photo, though, was that the people who were in the photo were still the same people when I got through with the restoration!! It was just a different, slightly wonkie, jacket.

With regards to compositing, sometimes there’s no other way. In my current OPR effort, a photo of a man and woman at a cafe, the womans face is, again, completely gone. So, even though I hate to, I’m having to composite. The photo looks to be from the 50′s, and you can see a vague shadow of what her hairstyle might have been, the type of top she wore, and where her eyes were at least placed on her face. There’s also a clue where the nose and mouth might have been – it looks like she may have been smiling, but the water “melted” and faded it to a grimace. So, in compositing the face, I found some photos of the era (some of them from my own collection) and used different eyes, mouth, nose, hair, from different pictures. The reason for this is, you don’t want the person looking through an old copy of “Life” magazine, one day, and seeing that exact face from their photo. I placed the elements where they should all go in relation to what was still evident in the photo. Now, I have to blend it all and somehow make it looks like it belongs in the photo. I hate doing that, because that is not, nor will it ever be, the person who was originally in that photo. That person is impossible to get back, however, so the least I can do is make the “new” person look like they actually sat for that photo – to the best of my ability.

In closing, I don’t want to discourage anyone from volunteering their time and skills to Operation Photo Rescue, on the contrary, I very much encourage you to join in this effort!! I just want to also encourage you to volunteer at your skill level! These people we’re helping deserve the very best work we can give them! An added benefit to working at your skill level will be the lack of feeling overwhelmed by the monumental task you’ve set for yourself! You’ll be less stressed, you’ll feel better for your accomplishment and the person whose photo you’re restoring will get the best possible result!!

Tags: Opinions, OPR, Restoration, Self Improvement, Tips