Photo Restoration – Jimmy & Phyllis Sutherland (wedding)

Continuing the theme of the photo restorations,

Here is another one from my family’s history. This time it’s my grandma and granddad’s wedding.

Given the circumstances, this is an excellent photograph. I don’t know when it was taken, but I’ll try to learn as much as I can about it and include it later. I usually enjoy knowing about classical weddings with all of their rituals and traditions. Even their engagement rings used to be large and elegant. Though I enjoy the new designer engagement rings Denver as well, I also miss what they used to have in old times. The photographs are typically quite old, but they remain elegant in every way. Also, at times, I wonder how wedding photography would have been so stressful and time-consuming back then because cameras were not as light-weight as they are now.

It has changed a lot since this photo was taken, as you can see on a site like https://jeffturnbull.co.uk, but it’s still a beautiful picture.

From what I can gather from my dad, My grandfather worked for a building firm called Carr’s although usually when we talk about family history we’re in the pub, so the combination of my dad being drunk telling and stories, and me being drunk listening doesn’t help me at all. Maybe I should check out local obituaries (see this page) to try and find out some more about my family history, who knows, it could be incredibly interesting. I’ll try not to be drunk when doing it.
I believe that Carr’s was based in Morpeth, but I could be very wrong here, and my granddad was a foreman?
After this photo, Jimmy and Phyllis went on to have three sons a daughter, and at least one Yorkshire terrier, John, Eric, David, and Pat, John being my father (and I can’t remember what the Yorkshire terrier was called!).

Jimmy and Phyllis Sutherland's wedding

I’m editing this photo on photoshop CS4, scanned in using a pretty low res scanner, canoscan lide 100, which is the only scanner I can get a hold of at the moment.

To start with, I thought this one looked pretty simple, but as I go into it it turned out that it was a little more complicated.

Firstly, the big fold down across the legs didn’t appear to scan properly, so that the lower section was slightly underexposed.
this should have been a simple correction of the levels, but it turned out to be a little more complicated than that, as the legs themselves seemed to be more effected than the background.

I ended up having to cut the legs out individually, and correct their levels individually, the left leg (as we look at it) was even taken into two sections, which made it easier to correct the exposure. Once I got the legs exposed correctly (or at least what looks right to me), I then merged the layers, then used the smudge tool to smudge the rough edge, then, over this used the clone tool to make the blurred edge less noticeable.

When I zoomed into this image, It was very very dirty, lots of dust and scratches covering the whole image, which can only be expected in an image this old, the healing brush was used in most circumstances to get rid of the tiny scratches, set to a very small brush, and clicking on them individually to get the best results on the larger areas.
With some of the scratches they were to close to an edge to use the healing brush (the healing brush really hates edges!) so the clone tool was used in these situations.

I think it was the techniques of the time, (although I’m not entirely sure), but photos taken around the time this photo was taken (again, I will find out but I’m taking a punt and saying it around 1934), have a very soft focus, so I sharpened the image using the unsharpen mask tool, which did a fantastic job on the background, but not so much on the figures in the image. The image still looks better, but the quality of the sharpening wasn’t as great on the “important” bits as it was on the background. I often wonder, if this photo was taken with modern cameras and advanced lighting equipment, it might be clearer and more colorful as compared to these black and white photos. Additionally, photographers have also developed new styles and angles to capture the photos. Likewise, there are different companies like Rhode Island wedding photography experts who have the caliber and skillset to make the wedding memorable. Since these people and equipment weren’t there in 1934, we need to use software to restore those images.

Meanwhile, I also played with the contrast a lot to get the look right, with some work with the dodge and burn tools too.

I usually hardly ever use the dodge and burn tools but with restoring photos in black and white I have found them to be really helpful.

More than anything, this image was more time-consuming than technically difficult (for the most part), with lots of scratches to get rid of.

the faces were luckily quite undamaged, unfortunately my granddads face had quite a big scratch that went right through the corner f the eye, possibly the worst place it could be, as I had no reference points to repair from, so I pretty much had to guess, and use the other eye as a guide. i did the best job I could, but a pro could probably have done a better job (or even just a better scan, so i could get in closer)
Grandma’s face had a bit of damage to the brim of the hat and face, this wasn’t too difficult to get rid of using the clone tool, which made short work of the damage.

While most of the image was in focus, the trails from the flowers seem to be double exposed, not really out of focus/blurry, but more they were exposed correctly, then must have moved, and been exposed again, this usually happens either when a flash has been used with an exposure that is longer than necessary , or when the film hasn’t been wound on, however, that’s probably not the case here, as I would have assumed that then the whole image would have been double exposed, either that or they stood really really still!!

Here is the finished image.

Jimmy and Phyllis Sutherland - edited

Thanks for looking.

Chris