More Photo Restoration

It has been quite a while since I last wrote. On September 24, I broke my back when I fell from a ladder while running some ethernet cable at work. I am doing much better now, but apparently will not be able to return to work for another 6 weeks.

I recently went through my Grandma Barrett's Plastic tub full of Family Photos and other things. Among the things I found was the following image of my Great Great Grandfather, William Sergeant Dixon, and his wife, Emma Duncan (Thomas) Dixon:

As you can see, the image is extremely faded, to the point where you can just barely even make out the faces. Fortunately, computers are pretty good at fixing things like this. I loaded this image up in the gimp (a free program similar to photoshop) and turned the brightness down and the contrast up. This resulted in the following image:

It is still pretty difficult to make out some of the features on William Sergeant Dixon's face and shirt. The rest of the image shows a marked improvement, however. I then used the bezier selection tool to select just WSD's face and shirt, so I could darken it up without darkening the rest of the image. There was still the problem of his face having uneven lighting, so I then had to select a portion of his face and lighten it up. This resulted in an ugly line going across his face, so I then used the heal tool, which comes in handy for removing lines and creases from old photos. The resulting image is this:

 

As far as I can tell, that looks much better. His face is maybe a little dark, but you can actually see it, which is much better than what I started out with. There was another photo I found of my Great Great Great Grandfather, John Turk Beecher and his wife, Maria H. Sprague. This photo was in very bad shape and I didn't have much hope for it at all:

It is on some kind of strange blue print which has faded substantially over the past 100+ years. My first attempt at restoring this image was not really what I was going for:

 

 

So, I tried again. This time, yielding different results:

 

I still wasn't satisfied with the results. So, I tried again, this time converting to grayscale:

That's about as good as this image is going to get, I'm afraid. I'm still pretty amateur at this, but I think I am getting reasonably good results from my limited image editing skills.