I’ve been going through my photos from 1988, these are the baby pictures of my first son.  (Boy, I wish I knew then what I know about photography and what kinds of pics I’d want to have for keepsakes.  Ah, well.)

Here’s a great example of a photo that’s desperately in need of rescuing.  Cute baby, adorable smile, great pose . . . and awful photography:

What to do?  If you have Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Elements, you can make lemonade from this lemon by using filters.

I used the artistic dry brush filter to make this photo look like a painted portrait.  Click on Filter>Artistic>Dry Brush.

As you can see, there are many other possibilities to choose from.  I recommend you try them all.  Different filters will work better with different types of photos.

Once you choose a filter, you can also play with the settings to get just the look you want.  I used a Brush Size of 2, Brush Detail of 8 and a Texture setting of 1.  It defaults to a preview at 100% and you can move the photo around in the little window to look at different areas.

And here’s my final result.  I think it looks like we had a portrait painted of our little guy, a vast improvement over the grainy pic I began with.

It looks even better printed out, in fact I think I might get it printed on canvas to make it look more like a painting.

I’d love to hear from all of you about your favorite ways to rescue bad photos.

Have a great weekend!

Sandy

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