Vibrant New Photo Restoration Community

The recently launched forums on the OPR Workshop website is no ordinary community of digital artists. These are talented photo restorers with a purpose, and they've rapidly turned their message board into a vibrant and informative venue for their volunteers.

Operation Photo Rescue was formed in 2005 around the idea of providing voluntary photo restoration services to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Many of these people not only lost their homes in the flooding that Katrina caused, but their cherished family photos were also severely water damaged. Many thousands of wedding photos, baby photos, genealogy photos, and more were virtually destroyed. Sentimentality prevented people from throwing the photos away, even though they feared they were unsaveable.

Over the last year, however, the network of OPR volunteers has grown at an astonishing rate, and they have proved time and again that even the most severely damaged photos can often be restored to their original, or better than original condition. Reading the stories of the owners' reactions when their newly restored photos are returned to them is reward enough for this tireless army of photo restoration volunteers.

The new OPRWorkshop forum is a place where OPR volunteers can showcase their photo restoration work, get advice, assistance and feedback, and interact with other OPR volunteers across the globe. An indespensibe resource.

-Mark.

Flattening rolled up old photos

Over time, old photos can dry out and become rolled up or curled, becoming too brittle to flatten out for scanning or photographing for restoration. Humidification is the process used by document and photo restoration experts for relaxing (flattening out) rolled up documents and old photos.

Depending on the photo itself, it is often possible with care to attempt this at home. Building a humidification chamber for relaxing old photos before restoration is quite a simple process. The group mentioned in the blog linked below did just this during the restoration of 600 old photos which they restored.

Old Photos & Genealogy: Shoe Box of Soldier Photos Restored

If you have old photos that need to be relaxed before restoration, I suggest reading this technical leaflet on Relaxing and Flattening Paper by Humidificaion before trying anything yourself as certain photos will not be suitable for this process, and you will need to determine this in advance.

-Mark.