Catalina Crew

[Richard Briggs Profile]

A friend of mine asked me to scan some WWII vintage 120 size negatives he had obtained and which had never seen the light of day for over 70 years (They had recently been found tucked away in a little envelope). It was an amazingly emotional experience to see these negatives come to life and then to see how SPE could inject some fresh and contemporary life into them. Especially this one which, as you can see from the first picture (the original scan and hence negative) was a pretty poor pohotograph. The second image is the result of using SPE's Image Treatment. Finally several effects have been applied.

For those interested, these are British RAF aircrew from World War II sitting on the fuselage of a Catalina flying boat (one propeller tip is visible on the right).

[Sam Spader334 Profile]

Nicely recovered and appropriate too..Well done............

[Arwin Profile]

Beautiful to see how you recovered the image, would be for sure a grateful job to do! Very well done!

Arwin

[eadams Profile]

Richard, you did an excellent job restoring the image and recovering the detail! The effect you applied at the end looks great on this image since it has a stained weathered look that enhances the aged look of the photo. My personal preference would be to mask it out on the faces, since it degrades some of the facial detail and expression, which is what I like best about the original shot

Eve

[Richard Briggs Profile]

Hi Eve, I fully understand your comment and, in fact, this is always my default approach when masking. However, for this one it just didn't seem to work. Hard to explain but the version shown looked better (in my opinion). I think it depends on the 'difference' between the original and the effect. if it is extreme (as this is) then sometimes it's better to not mask and make it look like the whole image has been 'degraded' or whatever. But, for all that, I agree, I've lost valuable detail in the faces. Maybe I'll give it another go. It may work if the 2nd image is converted to sepia first and then has the effect (masked) applied.

Richard

[andrewb2012 Profile]

An AMAZING RESTORATION Richard - who would have thought you could retrieve so much detail. Absolutely love the B&W version - the textured one is fine too, but I think the colors are too bright and as a result the image seems to lose some of its VINTAGE feel. All of that is a matter of opinion. The main thing is you more than successfully recovered a GEM from the past - Superb Work my friend, well done!

Cheers,

Andrew