Repairing A Torn Image That Won't Connect

[RickBarr26]

Hi everyone,

I'm admittedly fairly new to extreme photo repair, but I've worked on quite a few pieces, and have a good handle on a lot of it.  I'm trying to help a friend out with an old photo from the 1950s of his grandmother.....it's torn into three pieces, which isn't a big deal......except, the pieces don't connect.  At all. 

This image is a photograph I took of the pieces, put together as well as I possibly could.  It's essentially in three pieces, the far left piece, the top, and then the right/bottom piece.  The right-bottom piece is not warped at all, or torn on the back.  Neither is the top piece.  Yet, they simply will not connect on both sides.  If I move the bottom-left portion of the top image down to match the right-bottom piece, the face of the woman is now split.

I'm really at a loss as to how to proceed.  I really does not appear that there are tears or other deformities that are causing this mis-match.  I'm very much against the idea of trying to somehow "warp" the pieces together, that wouldn't work at all.  If anyone with experience with this can help, either with PS techniques or even just thoughts on why this might happen to a photo like this, I'd very much appreciate it. 

Thank you!

-Rick Barr

PS 19.1.6

[Francesco Della Peruta · Accepted solution]

This is a job for these amazing tools:

Retouch and repair photos

[angie_taylor]

If it was me, I’d be tempted to separate each piece onto to own layer, try to scale and position them so they are as close as possible, focussing on the most important elements, the face. then use Puppet pins to very slightly adjust elements to fit. Use content aware fill to fill any gaps and then use the patch tool, healing brush and spot healing brush to repair scratches and other remaining blemishes.

[RickBarr26]

Thanks both of you.  Angie, I tried the Puppet pins.  A very interesting and delicate tool!  I couldn't get it to not warp in the wrong places, so I shelved it for now.  I'd never used it before, and it looks like I just need to practice and figure it out more.

I had already created three layers, one for each of the pieces, so I went ahead and started splicing out sections of the bottom portion and blending them in with the rest.  It turned out better than I thought (but you be the judge).  I also did a lot of work with the Spot Healing Brush Tool, Clone Stamp Tool, and a few others.

I marked Francesco's answer as correct, mainly because a couple of those links led me to a quicker way to get some of this done, but I appreciate both of you taking the time to help!

-Rick

[angie_taylor]

Thanks for the update. The problem you had with the puppet pins is because you also have to add pins to the areas that you want to “lock down” so that they don’t move. I may do a little tutorial for you, using that file if you’d be happy for

me to use it? Also, if you set the Puppet tool settings to Rigid you will experience less distortion.

[RickBarr26]

Oh wow, that'd be great, Angie, thank you.  I would imagine that has to be a little less time-consuming than what I did, copy/pasting areas.  Plus, I really just got lucky that I had that relatively uncomplicated section to do that with anyway.