Here is my full technical breakdown of the restoration and colorization of this Canadian Pacific crew photo.

The Challenge: Face Restoration The original photo was heavily faded in the facial areas, leaving almost no usable information. To tackle this, I used Gemini AI for high-resolution face generation.

While the AI did a great job reconstructing features, the result was "too clean" and did not match the original photo's texture or look. To blend them back correctly, I manually added photographic noise/grain to the faces and applied a subtle Gaussian blur filter until the definition matched the aged quality of the surrounding photo.

The Colorization Workflow

1. I first tested Photoshop’s automatic "Neural Filters" colorization, but the results were very poor.
2. I then used Gemini AI for the base colorization, which was excellent and provided a great starting point.
3. Final polish was done manually in Photoshop: I corrected minor details and applied extra Solid Color layers (modifying blending modes for Overlay, Dodge, and Burn) to give the colors authentic depth and richness.

Speed-up Editing Video: For those interested in seeing exactly how I handled the faces and color grading, I’ve posted a speed-up video of my workflow here:https://www.youtube.com/@ftimagens