David, 1967

I was approached by someone to restore a badly damaged military photo. I explained that, due to the amount of damage, the final result would be more of a painting than a photograph and the client was fine with that. I started with some simple color and tone adjustments in Lightroom and then brought the image into Photoshop and used the patch, healing, and clone tools to try to fill in some of the missing image. Then I recreated the uniform, adding the lapel pins and cap insignia. I added a flag to give some additional story and interest to the background.

At this point, I reached out to the client to ask if there was any rank insignia that needed to be added and realized I had made a fundamental mistake. When doing the color corrections on the original photo, I mistakenly removed too many yellows and made his Army uniform into an Air Force uniform! Realizing my error, thankfully before submitting a proof to the client (and I hope he never sees this blog post), I repainted his uniform and insignia with the correct colors. whew!

After providing an image proof to the client and getting feedback, I realized I had been far too confident in that original patch/clone/healing job. Although the corrected image looked great to me, the client didn’t feel that it looked like him. I had a few meetings with him and tweaked the features here and there until he was happy with the result.

I have to admit, every time I look at it, I see 20 things I want to change. But this image has gone through twelve revisions over six months and I had to stop. The client was happy and that should be all that matters!

I got the client’s permission to use the completed restoration in image competition and also reached out to the Department of Defense to make certain that this intake photo (taken at Fort Knox Army Base) was in the public domain. The client has been following the image’s progression through State, District, and International competition with great enjoyment! It is currently one of 117 images (out of 5,200 pieces submitted) in the running for the Grand Imaging Award.