Photo Restoration

It has been over a week since my last writing. It has been a bit of a hectic week. Melissa and I had to go to Oklahoma City to see a Perinatologist to make sure that the baby didn't have any problems on account of Melissa's gestational diabetes. Everything came back fine, but then Melissa convinced me to check my blood sugar. It came back 276. At the Doctor's Office on Friday it was 459, so they put me on Metformin and I haven't been feeling so well. Anyway, I'll be writing more frequently for a while, hopefully.

Everyone who does some work on the family history will eventually run across some old photos that are either damaged, faded, dirty, or all of the above. Fortunately, we live in "the future" where we can sometimes restore these old photos a bit. I have an old 4 generation photo on the Barrett side that is not in very good shape. Here is my original:

Using the Gimp and a few plugins, I was able to remove the horizontal and vertical crease in the photo, as well as the spots on Edward Exum's knee and James Bennett's Suit. I was also able to slightly sharpen the image. Here is the result:

I don't think I can improve much more on this one. The photo is too old and my original is a copy of a copy of a copy of the actual photo to begin with, so this is probably the best I can do unless I can get my hands on the actual photograph itself. Problem is, the original photo may or may not still exist. Fortunately, this restoration only took about 20 minutes. I'm a complete novice when it comes to this, and plan to improve my photo restoration skills in the future. Perhaps I will write a tutorial when I have more experience.