This picture is nearly 100 years old and was losing emulsion.  It was also creased, stained and nearly rotting away.  What makes it special is its rareity.  It is the only photo I have come across of my maternal great-grandparents, Jedidiah and Mary Ellen Hoag.  Restoring this image was a labor of love and a must save for the family.  The process I used was taking a high resolution scan on my Epson flatbed scanner using Silverfast software to extract as much detail as possible.  The next step was to enter the metadata and do minor adjustments with Lightroom.  The heavy lifting was done in Photoshop using a display tablet and a pressure sensitive pen.  Yes this took many hours but I think you'll agree the results below were worth the effort.  I had the pleasure of knowing my great grandmother, she lived into her mid-90's but Jed was struck by lightning on April 8th, 1922 and he did not survive the event.

Here is Vern Metz, circa 1950 - photographer unknown. I would imagine he was on his lunch break joining his parents Art and Christine Metz as he crossed Third Street in Yankton SD - approaching their home.

In the background was Yaggie Mills.

Just click on the pictures for a larger view.

The photograph was provided by Barb Metz who had the original print.  While it may not be possible to see the scratchs and spots with the resolution of a web photo, I can assure you they were there. It is also clear that the photo was yellowing and beginning to fade, so a good time to make a digital copy to archive for future generations.

Using an Epson Photo Scanner, I captured this image into a high resolution TIFF, converted it into black and white and removed many of the imperfections within the emulsion. I then created layers so that I could bring out the detail in the background and improve the contrast.

It all happened on July 10th, 1934 - that was the date when Glen and Katie got married. A simple ceremony without a photographer, not so unusual for 1934 but luckly someone took this one shot and it is the only one that remains until this day.  We were lucky that their daughter, Helen looked after it, keep it in a dry dark place for over 80 years upon which time she lent said image to your humble correspondent to scan and restore. Below are the results of that scan.

This is the final result, restored with more detail, better contrast, yellowing removed and those pesky specks and scratches in the print emulsion. The original image was less than a two-by-two inches in size.