A while ago my soon-to-be mother-in-law dropped by with an family photograph she had found in a box of old pictures. She was putting together her family tree and this was the only existing picture of some long-dead relations - but it was torn in half and pretty battered. To make matters worse, since I had taken this copy the original had been lost. Could anything be done to restore it? Here’s my attempt.

The image was scanned as below at 400dpi. I realise I could have pieced the picture together before scanning but I thought scanning them as two pieces would allow for greater flexibility.

You’ll notice that there is a certain amount of overlap; an area of paper is visible where the two pieces sheered away from each other when it was ripped. This will need to be remedied later.
To start piecing it back together I had to get rid of the black area created by the scanner. Thankfully the Scissors Select Tool was made for this kind of thing!

Look out for an in-depth tutorial on this tool in the next few days.

I cut out each half and pasted it into its own layer. I could then move the bottom half up the canvas and begin piecing it together.

The torn areas from the top layer continue to show through while underneath it the missing part of the picture is hidden. You can also see that although the Scissors Tool did an excellent job of detecting the edge of the photo, there’s still a feathering of black.

The next stage is to move the layers around until the picture is as well aligned as possible. Luckily with this picture the vertical and horizontal bars of the sash window made it painless to line up. Without something like that you could carefully align it by eye or use the edges as a guide. When moving the pieces around the arrow keys will let you to move each layer by a pixel or two at a time.

A few large areas of paper were showing where the tear occured. To get rid of this it simply needs to be removed from the top layer as the missing fragment should still be present in the layer below. For this I’m going to use my favourite - Scissor Select.

The light brown area along the margin is where some of the coating has lifted away from the paper. This will have to be rectified later by reproducing that part of the image.

Once the torn edge has been minimised the photograph looks more crumpled than torn and you can start to see the man’s face.

The final stage for now is to zoom in and work along the tear, removing any feathering that may have occurred.

Stick around over the next few days when I’ll be showing you how to reduce the blemishes in the photograph and begin to sympathetically enhance it. If you want to work along with me you can download the original file. As always, don’t forget to read the license.