Photoshop: Restoring Old Photographs & Actions

The example marriage certificate in the assignment document is no longer available online, so I chose a different marriage certificate to work with - one that I thought would still be a challenge (since the one in the example seemed like it would take some work also).

To fix the marriage certificate:

1. I began by using the healing brush and clone stamp tool. Once I got a decent-sized patch of good (fixed) texture, I used that patch as the source for the rest of my clone stamp brushing throughout the certificate (long and tedious process).
2. Once I finished fixing the crinkles I desaturated the document and altered the brightness / contrast to make the words stick out better against their background.
3. I ran the "Unsharp Mask" filter and then the Sepia toning in the actions panel.
4. Lastly, I scaled down the certificate and ran the sharpen filter, which I then faded to 30%.

Before:

After: