Restoring old photos is pure tedium and two hours of it will leave you a nervous wreck. My parents have boxes of old photos and some of them have been folded, have fly specks, are faded and so on and some of these things date back to the 20s. Only way to fix them is one pixel at a time.
The sources are so inconsistent and so many different techniques for the various messes that they get into. I don't mind doing one or two every so often when asked but they are bloody nightmare and you're glad to see the back of them when you're done. Spend most of the time cursing the people who let their photos get into such a state in the first place, LOL!
My mother-in-law was the worst, she went through a mental phase of cutting out people she didn't like so when my wife found all the old photos she had to match a stack of heads and bodies back to their source photos before she could start scanning them.
My mother-in-law was the worst, she went through a mental phase of cutting out people she didn't like so when my wife found all the old photos she had to match a stack of heads and bodies back to their source photos before she could start scanning them.
Most of the ones we have are not bad, but there are an awful lot of them and there are enough that something happened to to keep me busy.
I repaired one once for my mom. I was nit picky enough about it and it was a small photo. I couldn't see myself offering that service! That could be nerve-wracking, being trusted with such precious piece of history.
I would hate to do it as a service, mainly because most people don't have a clue. Any image I've ever been given to edit something out or change has been a low-res photo that's basically neigh on impossible to adjust or look better. This would then cause me to put in less effort and adopt the attitude have the attitude "Oh sod it, the photo sucks anyway, and it's a small crappy one - they're not going to care much anyway"
The last two I did were 8x10s and each had been folded into quarters, cracking the emulsion. There were also a bunch of little spiderweb cracks running through them. All of those had to be filled in and each one took almost a month.
Eugh, the one I did wasn't nearly that bad.. Just some color warping and it was a little larger than a wallet size, few creases. Kudos to your patience!
The biggest problem with doing those is that you never want to look at them again.