Ronnie Lawrence, a friend of mine, recently asked if I could restore a Boris photograph of his mother-in-law Ada Margolis on her wedding day. The faded sepia image is reproduced below.
Original wedding photo of Ronnie Lawrence’ mother – hand coloured, but faded!
In the twenties the East End of London was a poor, predominantly Jewish area. This was where Boris Bennett, an immigrant from Poland, set himself up as a wedding photographer. He established his studio in Whitechapel in the twenties, and soon carved a niche for himself by his creative mastery of Hollywood lighting and set creation using art deco props. Over his career he took over 150 thousand photographs, and many still have pride of place on mantle shelves around the country.
The restoration process
It was an interesting exercise to restore the image. I first scanned it in high resolution, then took it into Photoshop and used the white point dropper in Levels to set the white point. I tried the same for the black point using the black dropper, but the result was way to blocked out, so shifted the black point slider in Levels along to butt against the histogram where tones were just appearing. The next step was to clone out the spots and discolourations on the print. The print has obviously been painstakingly hand coloured, so I added several colour overlay layers, masking and adjusting to bring back skin tones, dress colouring and colour to the flowers. It was important to remain faithful to the original retouching, rather than create a ‘modern’ look to the photograph.
Both the grain and time had not been kind to the face, so I smoothed the cheeks and forehead subtly, then ‘sculpted the face using a 50% grey layer in overlay mode to give definition to the facial features, using a fine brush at low opacity on the grey – white to lighten, and black to darken.
There was a hint of catchlight still visible in the eyes, so I created a blank layer and on high magnification enhanced the catchlights, to bring life to the face.
The final step was to add a curves layer, selecting Auto to bring back some ‘pop’ to the image, fading this layer until it looked natural.
The restored wedding photo
You can find more of Boris’ work, in an interesting Daily Telegraph article Wartime Wedding Glamour in the East End. There is now also a lavishly illustrated book “Vintage Glamour in London’s East End” , by Frank Harris and Michael Greisman
