Restoration of a silhouette using Photoshop.
A birthday surprise for my Mother.
The original silhouette was shaped with small scissors at a seaside stall in Blackpool when my mother was 6 years old. The year was 1948 and rationing was still in force throughout the war-torn United Kingdom. My mother, her sister and my grandparents were on holiday at the time and my grandfather was fascinated by the dexterity and skill of the old man who was cutting the profiles. The original silhouette is only 3 inches high and over the years sunlight has taken it's toll, it's never been covered over by glass so it's a little grimy too! I've always known how much my mother treasures her little gem of a cut out, so last year I decided to do something special for her birthday. I managed to borrow her silhouette for a couple of hours while she was out shopping and then but it back without her ever knowing!
A Framed print of the Silhouette for her birthday.
Over the many years that this little treasure has been in my mothers possession it's been mounted onto card and when that became damaged the silhouette was mounted onto more card. My mother will be able to store the original away safely when I give her the A3 framed print. Hopefully I can recreate the detail of the artist and the fine pencil sketching.
Poor condition of the original.
The pencil drawing has faded and there is even small hairs stuck to the cardboard. The old man who created this little marvel must have really had excellent eyesight for his years!
Project Requirements.
For this little restoration project I used a flat-bed scanner and Photoshop. A small amount of operational knowledge of Photoshop and use of layers and masks is required but by no means do you have to be an expert image manipulator. The software need not necessarily be Photoshop but can be any image editor that uses layers to build images.
I captured relevant screen snippets during the editing process to aid clarity. All dialogue has been entered as a description to the relevant photograph in the series, this means you will not have to toggle between text and picture and also there is less duplication of text. If you intend to carry out a similar project then I might suggest this guide is opened in a separate window for reference purposes.
To avoid confusion when scrolling down through the series, relevant text is placed 'beneath' each image.
