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Cleaning/Restoring old portrait?

daesaflgatorfan

16 years ago

When my mom passed 7 months ago, I was the only one who wanted a portrait of our grandmother. Unforunately, my parents were very heavy smokers, and the portrait is very soiled with nicotine stains. I want to get it cleaned/restored, and copied for an uncle. I got an estimate today of $285.00 to clean, restore and do fresh oils on the portrait. Right now, that is out of my range. Is there anything I can do to clean it myself? I know if I just have it copied as is, the stains will show up, which is not what I want.

Please, any help?

Comments (6)

kentuck_8b
16 years ago
Depending on how bad it is, you may be able to restore a great deal of the photo, if not all, using one of the photo programs already in your computer, or you can purchase one, or maybe even download one from the computer for free, but it takes patience and a lot of time.

Kt
daesaflgatorfan
Original Author
16 years ago
Thanx, Kt. I do have a pretty good program, I think, but I don't have the time to fine tune it.

Thanx, again.
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kentuck_8b
16 years ago
How stained is the photo? Could you post it here, if that's not asking too much? Sometimes the discolouration isn't as bad as people think.

Kt
Tinmantu
16 years ago
Restoring a photo without paying a professional takes a lot of patience and a good program...I used paintshop pro and probably 4 hrs of my life to achieve this and it still isn't perfect.

before

after
kentuck_8b
16 years ago
That's not bad, Tinmantu! I still don't know how bad daesaflgatorfan's photo is.

What I do when I touch up a photo, it to zoom in on it, section by section, and eventually do the whole photo.

I also constantly save it so that in case I mess something up, I don't lose everything.

One last thing, in darker photos, I brighten them up as I do the touch-ups, then darken them back to the original when I get finished.

Kt
Tinmantu
16 years ago
Thanks kentuck...yep, multiple saves, zoom in max, clone brush and hope for the best...that's my mom's baby picture circa 1920....even though it wasn't perfect to me, it brought a smile to her face. That's all that mattered.

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