Photographs are our memories.  They commemorate those special times and moments.  This is no more true than for a wedding.  Weddings are those special life moments that we want to capture and reflect on for the rest of our lives.  As time progresses chemicals fade taking with them our precious photographs.  Technology though has advanced to an incredible extent.  Recently I discovered my parent’s wedding album from 1970.  For their 45 wedding anniversary, I decided to see what I could do for their photographs and see if there was a way I could bring them anew.  I used a CanoScan 9000F to create high-resolution digital files of the original pictures (negatives were not available, though would have been preferable)  I then used Adobe Lightroom 5 making use especially of creative brushes as well as Google Nik Collection to edit the files.

Here are what the original scans looked like:

As you can see the paper had yellowed with time and there were some issues with color trueness.  I did some selective editing, correcting white balance on the images was difficult with so little information to work with.  I also burned the backgrounds while dodging the subjects especially the bride to give the images more “pop” and vibrancy. Here are what the finished images look like:

Though not perfect, the images are much better looking than the originals.  I was even able to correct some of the red-eye effect from the shoe mounted flash the photographer used.