Last week I shared a document restoration.  Continuing on the theme of image restoration (not just photos), I thought I would share this restoration of a watercolour painting with you.

The original image is dated 1856 and is believed to be a painting of an early dwelling in Gipps Street, Richmond.

It has obviously seen better days; creased, stained and yellowed with age.  After an initial levels correction it was also very obvious that that blue stain should not be there.

I had hoped that the blue stain could easily be removed from the image by adjusting individual colour channels and masking.  Unfortunately this didn’t achieve the results I wanted so frequency separation techniques were used to help isolate the colour and textural information making it easier to restore this section.  There was quite a lot of work involved, removing spots, repairing creases and of course removing those stains.

The finished image was giclee printed on a textured fine art paper by Image Science, Melbourne.

Many thanks to the Chalmers and Reid families  for allowing me to share this beautiful image which captures a little of Melbourne’s history.