Discouraged...

[Patre]

I recently joined this site because I thought I might be able to make a contribution to some of the people who suffered damaged images as the result of hurricane Katrina. I listed myself  as an intermediate skill user of
CS2. However, I must confess that I am less than impressed with the two restorations I have attempted since
joining the site, and in fact, am somewhat discouraged about the results because I don't think they are credibly
authentic.
However, I don't know the standard of work that is acceptable here, and I don't want to submit inferior work
that will waste the evaluator's time and energy. Here are two images: the damaged one and the one I attempted to restore. Is the restored image acceptable? I will not be offended by an honest opinion.








Thanks for your help...
Pat Thompson

[rockthumper]

Hi Pat,
I'm new here too and I sympathise with your desire for a definition of an acceptable standard for the restorations. Obviously that's not an easy thing to define.
I think you should bear in mind firstly that pretty much whatever you do will be better than some water damaged item slowly being eaten by mould and mildew and secondly the expectation is the restoration should be turned round within a week - I read that as saying you do the best you can in the free time you can reasonably allocate to the job in about one week. So if you are bogging down in detail and it's going to take a month to fix it working 24/7 then you're being too fastidious!
However I think you raise a good point about restoring documents, as opposed to photographs, that being the added complication of their authenticity. To properly restore your report card I would think you needed to know, for example, what colour the original report cards were (maybe they were brown?). The crest is another example of an item which would need to be authentic in the final image, fortunately it is undamaged in your example so you don't have any problems there.
Subject to what the more experienced members have to say, I'd go with your yellow image and perhaps work on the hand written part to make it look more like blue ink. Otherwise it looks fine.
You've done the right thing by posting, there are plenty of people here who can offer good advice and help you improve your skills if need be.
RT.

[Ausimax]

Hi Pat,

I have no idea what colour paper these reports would have been printed on but I would think a buff colour likely.

Working on that premise I would clean up the existing background and try and straighten the warped type at the top, select, copy, paste and realign with the transform tool.

When you get that OK flatten the image and do a curves or levels adjustment to lighten the background you could also add a texture pattern,( Filter gallery, texture, texturiser, sandstone)

This is a quick and nasty try I did on your image, hope it is of help to you, don't get discouraged, I started well behind the Eight ball and I'm still trying to catch up.





Max

[Mhayes]

Hi Pat,

Don't feel discouraged, we've all been there. By posting your progress you benefit from the experience of the others. It is hard to know what color the report card was originally but I would lean to buff or perhaps more of light brown the color of cardboard.

Nice to have you onboard!

Margie

[John]

Pat, Welcome to OPR!  Don't get yourself down, we're all here to help you.

[Tess (Tassie D)]

Hi Pat, welcome to the hair tearing society, we've all been there.  ;D You'll find it gets easier the more you do.

I ran it through the ROC filter but didn't like the result. I think its more like Max said, a buff colour.

[rockthumper]

I dunno about buff, when I do a levels adjustment there's a truck load of yellow in there!
Nice clean-up of the text Tassie D - may I enquire what you did?

[Tess (Tassie D)]

RT I actually ran it through the old Paint shop Pro 8 one step photo fix. It does a nice job on text.

[Hannie]

Hi Pat,

Welcome to the board!  I've never restored documents before so this is really interesting to me!  The ROC filter s.t. has amazing results but more often I find that using the individual RGB levels gives a better idea of what the color used to be.
Great job cleaning up!  :up2:

Hannie

[glennab]

Hi Pat

Welcome, and bless you for jumping in and grabbing one of these monsters.  Since I took in Ms. Bradley's items, I can tell you that she wasn't as concerned about their "authenticity" as having something that looked better than the battered documents she brought in (she still has what's left of the authentic ones).  We (the Biloxi team) discussed exactly your concerns, because she could have had the documents "copied" at Staples or elsewhere, but she would then have had duplicates of the original mess. We decided to give it a try.  I told her we'd do the best we could, and I wanted you to know -- and anyone else who does a Bradley restoration -- that this lovely lady will be happy with anything we can make better for her.  She wasn't concerned about perfection, but these are treasured bits of her mother's career as a teacher and I gathered that this was something she was doing as a surprise.

I can also tell you that this past weekend I went through my school records book (I'm getting concerned about my treasures' safety in a hurricane), and I'm old enough and have traveled so much that I have documents of that sort from all over the world (I went to 5 schools in 2nd grade in Hawaii!).  Nearly every one is a buff, or off-white color with a slight texture to the paper.  So I don't think you can go wrong with any shade between light tan and a camel-yellow-tan (judging by the color of the original as best you can), straightening the type and adding a little noise.

I hope this helps.  Glad to have you with us -- and as you can tell here, you'll get plenty of help when you ask for it.

I'll try to jump in with comments about photos I recognize if there's anything I was told when I collected them.  I remember Ms. Bradley, because she had a box of photos that were mostly unsalvagable, and we shed a few tears over early photos of her that were so damaged that I had to tell her we couldn't do anything with them. She was so gracious, and there were several of which we covered portions with sticky notes so that the restorer would know that she didn't care about that particular area of the image, just portions where beloved family members showed.

With all the chaos going on, especially the first day when we were taking everything anyone brought in, some of those notes could have gotten lost in the shuffle.

Having talked to her for quite a while, I know she'll be glad for anything we can do for her.

Bless!

Glenna

[Mhayes]

Glenna,

You are amazing! You really capture the heart and soul of what this is all about. I know all of us feel a closer connection to the pictures when we hear behind the scenes stories of the people involved.

Margie

[Patre]

Thanks to all who encouraged,suggested and helped me restore this photo.
In the end, I adopted most of the suggestions and enhanced the image with
a background, texture and emboss layer style. I decided to compromise some of
the authenticity of the image in order to achieve a richer more dynamic visual look and feel.
However, I asked Christine to advise me, if the plainer more faithful to the
original image would be preferred. If so, I will forward that to her.
Again, Thanks for your help..
Here is the uploaded image..



Pat Thompson