Donna’s Cloak & MyHeritage Photo Repair
Treasure Chest Thursday
By Don Taylor
For this week’s Treasure Chest Tuesday, I’m looking at another clipping from the Donna Darling Collection. This photo is of Donna in her stage cloak. I’ve seen the image in several newspaper articles as it was a signature costume for her. The print itself is in terrible condition, torn, faded, just generally in awful, unusable condition.
I’ve known about MyHeritage’s photo repair capability for some time, but I hadn’t used it. As such, I figured I’d give it a try and see if it could help this image.
Donna Darling in her white cloak, circa 1926
I uploaded the image to MyHeritage then ran it through both the photo repair and photo enhancement. Zooming in on Donna’s face, I thought I’d see some improvement. Surprisingly, I did not see any difference. The repair smoothed the tear and some minor marks and tears, but nothing more than many other tools can do. That said, the process was straightforward. I’ve used Photoshop Elements and several other simple programs to clean up tears and marks. They typically do a similar job, but they take some experience to use and take more effort. It was the enhancement that I didn’t think the MyHeritage tool did much for my photo. I’ll try it again on something else and see if my opinion can be changed.
 Donna in her coat – Original Scan |
 Donna in her coat – Enhanced and Repaired |
The label on the back of this photo said, “Hokum ala Carte,” “Donna Darling,” and had a stamp that read “Darling and Clark Revue.”
Donna and Sammy were married in 1926, so this photo was taken after they got together, but probably towards the beginning of the Darling and Clark Revue in May 1926.
This photo is of Donna Darling in her cloak, circa May 1926.
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I tried to fix it in Gimp, because I no longer have Photoshop. I’m pretty good at repairing images like this in Photoshop.
So I brought up the contrast, and am working on the big fold across Donna’s shoulders. But the shading is very different on either side of the fold, and I haven’t yet figured out how to set Gimp’s clone tool so I can be more precise (like I can with Photoshop). The heal tool doesn’t seem to work at all on this. So it’s a work in progress.