Restoration

One of the most time consuming aspects of posting these images is the restoration process. Once an image is scanned, the overall brightness and contrast are adjusted taking special care to not lose any details in the highlights and shadows. After this, the manual restoration process begins. Each image is retouched by hand to correct for artifacts such as dust, dirt, hair, scratches, blemishes, chemical spots and other tonal irregularities. This retouching process generally takes two to four hours per image, although some especially difficult images have taken closer to six hours.

Below is an example before and after the retouching process. You can use your mouse to drag the slider back and forth…

The odd “fang-like” features are actually caused by a static electricity discharge before the film was developed.