Restoring a Photo on the Cheap

I wanted to include, in the historical-district exhibit at the Merrillville museum, the building that replaced the old California Exchange Hotel after it burned in 1912, but the only image we have of it is a halftone reproduction in A Pictorial History of Merrillville … which, I thought, when scanned and printed up again as a 4x6, would hardly be worth looking at.

So as not to spend a lot of money, I decided to try "restoring" it on my own. I scanned it, printed the scan as an 8x10 on photo paper, then went over the lines with drawing pencils and tinted it with colored pencils. Scanned the result again, and used some free photo editing software on my computer to try to enhance it a little more.

Here's the before and after:




Still not sure which version I like better.