While it is very easy to “restore” a photograph by blurring the image and airbrushing the faces to make the photo look as if it were taken with a phone camera and had Snapchat filters applied to it, a true challenge for a professional restoration artist is to preserve the authenticity of the original.
Sometimes the narrative conveyed by the scratches, folds, burn marks, and cropped edges are as important as the image in the photograph. Such marks of the time should be partially, if not entirely, preserved to pass on the sense of history and the live stories of those whose likeness a photograph depicts.
Posted by the client:
Really excited about this photo restoration by #sebastianwintermute!
My Papa's badass Navy portrait was brought back to life. - Hanna C.