Lee Yew Beng – Photo Restoration

You can read the Family Story for the person Lee Yew Beng here. The following write-up and photo links are specifically for family members who wish to download copies for themselves.

During the August 2016 family holiday to Kuching, we were able to locate what is arguably one of the most important family photos – a photo of Lee Yew Beng himself. Having borrowed the original, I brought it to a local photo shop back in Melbourne, Australia. The following files have been scanned and made available.

This is the original photo unedited, before any restoration work or enhancements were made. An inspection made by the photo shop reveals that it is in fact a copy of what must be the original work. The tell-tale signs are the different level of fading and how the inner oval must reflect a later framing effort. The cropped nature of the large oval background is part of how we know the original was much bigger and must have been copied. Looking at the quality of the paper and ink, it is a professional opinion that this physical copy was produced in the 1970s, which makes any more research into the original that much harder, if not impossible. [Click on the image to get the original file in high resolution]

This is the final version created which interested members of the family all over the world can download for their local printing and framing needs. My Dad and I collectively reviewed the proofs before agreeing on this output format, reducing the visible area to the smaller oval shape that had delineated the boundary in the original.

Here in Melbourne, we found that it can be printed to fit to either 8×12 or 8×10 frames. You can also choose to print this on photo paper via a DIY print effort if you have the photo paper, but with all these options available to us all, really the digital files here are all you need to get started. FYI, the original will be set back to Kuching along with a set of hard copy 6×4 and 8×12 prints.

Now, you may think that this is the end of the story, but I think there is still more to this project. A google of options reveals that the above is merely an electronic approach to photo restoration. Options include chemical, physical, copying and air-brush. This article does a good job in explaining these options. In order to progress any of these other options, a wider consultation with the family in Kuching is required since those options go beyond the understanding of us borrowing the photo for restoration purposes…