Chatique with Laura Lou

This was how I found this precious photo of his grandparent's wedding.  I also used these steps to repair a torn document, recently.

First I scanned each piece separately.  With the document, it was sent to me all in one scan with spaces between the pieces.

I moved the separate pieces onto a document in Photoshop.  I use adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 4.  The steps wouldn't be much different for other versions of Photoshop Elements or Creative Suite.  Using the lasso tool I removed the white around each photo piece.  Then I aligned the pieces to each other.

This could be tedious if you have many pieces and aren't sure where they fit.  Fortunately, this was only 4 pieces.  Then I used the clone tool to duplicate color and pattern to the tears that showed.  This is done by holding down the [alt] and moving the o with the x in it to an area very close to the tear.  Reduce the size, using the [ key until it is just a smidgen larger than the area being repaired.  let the alt key up and start carefully painting in over the tear.  Reposition the o with the x in it whenever the areas don't match.  I usually magnify the area on which I am working enough to work with detail.  You can repair edge tears, etc this same way.
Then use your filters, sharpening and smoothing tools to bring up the details as you want.


Then you can scrap or not as you want.  I chose NOT to use filters to make the differences in tone blend in.  I wanted the aged look.  I tried to fix the groom's mouth but there wasn't enough there to duplicate and other things I tried looked bad.  I think he may have had a light mustache, but this wasn't my family and I didn't know.