I Restored a Family's Photo and Preserved Their History. This was a powerful lesson.

Last week I experienced the power of preserving a family's history.

I own a freelance photography business, but I recently added Generations, a side business that I'm trying to build, restoring old damaged photos. Recently, a customer came to me with a family portrait dated 1923. It's 101 years old. The 16x20" print was in five pieces, and an important section was missing. Here is what he handed me:

"Can you fix this and make 10 16x20 inch prints that I can share with my siblings and cousins?" he asked. I love these kinds of challenges, and accepted this one. 

I copied each of the pieces, then put the jigsaw puzzle together. The next step was to fill in the missing area, restoring hands in laps, reconstructing clothing in the emissing area. I used a combination of AI generative fill tools and some other Photoshop tricks I've picked up along the way to fix the missing parts. The next step was to clean up any other scratches and imperfection, sharpen the overal image, fix the exposure, and restore the border area.

So much for the technical overview of what I did. What came next was a powerful lesson about why I do photo restoration. 

I presented a proof print of the final result to my client, It looked like this:

My client took one look and was nearly in tears. He explained that the young girl in the middle was his mother, and that this was the only photo in existence of his family when they were in Russia. He shared that most of the people in the photo did not make it out of Europe alive after World War II. That's which is why this photo was so meaningful and important to him.

Hearing his family's story made me realize not just the importance of preserving history through photos, but also why restoring old photos is just as crucial. Seeing his reaction made me glad that I chose to add this service as part of my business.