Photo Restoration Blog

I have here an example of a photo restoration, (removing a person) that if not correctly restored a simple brightness adjustment would reveal some very shoddy work indeed, I will explain.

Lets have a look at this photo of some handsome college chaps on a night out with their partners. A request was made to remove the girls from the background which could be easy if it weren’t for the a hand on a shoulder and filling of the huge gap left behind.

There are two ways to go about this, the quick way and the right way. The quick way would be to select the girls with the selection tools and careful selection. Then simply clone over the girls with a large soft clone brush and rebuilding the pink shirt where the hand was.

Here is the image lightened a great deal to show the background detail.

Cloning in this manner creates repeat patterns where the clone brush has just laid down the same texture and detail each time creating an unconvincing background.

The right way would be to select and clone over but then make sure the background details were consistent with the image by following on the trees and the rocks behind the boys. I would not be able to sleep knowing that an image had been butchered in this manner.

Here is the image with corrected background detail and the top section of shadows lightened.

Now you know when your restoration is received and it looks like that “the people have been removed”. Think a bit more about what has gone on to achieve what you asked. I am sure that you will now begin to appreciate just how much is involved when a request is made to “remove those people”.

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I have just made some scans of random images from the old album to illustrate some of the points made in my previous post.

“Family in the doorway”, is an example of where the scanning light reflects on the silver within the print and glares back as a bluish tint, upper left. (The silver was used in the chemicals to develop the photos). Isolation of the blue within editing software can go some way to removing the cast and once the foreground is balanced with the background then this could make a nice family photo once again.

In the previous post I talked about sepia images, this example, “Soldier boy” as I have called him is a sepia toned postcard style image around 3×2 inches. His gun is as tall as him with the bayonet in place. It may be that this sepia tone has come from ageing many years in a frame by a window, the sun’s rays causing damage over time. It may be that it was tinted sepia or it could be that heavy tobacco smoke helped with discolouration. I would approach this image by improving its contrast and tone, removing dust and dirt and trimming its edges. A nice touch would be to isolate the text and re-assemble the whole thing into a “new” postcard.

The image I really marvel at is this one titled “Sergeants Mess staff Plymouth 1938”. It measures around 5 x 2.5 inches This is an excellent example of the clarity of the old format negatives. These postcards were sometimes printed directly from the negative by contact printing. Simply laying the negative on the photographic paper and exposing to light. This meant that the resulting image was an exact copy of the negative and the details from this type of print was astonishing. Depending in the camera the film may have been projected onto the paper but the enlargements were fairly small as materials were still relatively expensive but as in the case of this image the detail is still excellent.

I have taken a small portion from the larger scan to show just how detailed they can be. You can see how bad this chaps teeth were, which is a testament to the quality and methods used by some of the photographers back in the 1930s.

Photos such as this can produce huge enlargements and a satisfying restoration normally results. These are my favourite kind of restorations and the more I look into them the more details I see. I restored a old naval photo of the 80 odd strong crew on board the ship Nasturtium and it wasn’t until the image was scanned in and cleaned up did I notice the ships mascot, a dog in the arm of one of the crew.

Thanks for reading.

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I can now show you some old photo examples in from this wonderful old album, there are some treasures in here. It contains postcard style prints from photographic studios in the 1920’s, smaller more modern prints on thinner, fragile paper. Some are sepia toned and others just plain black and white.

The chemicals used to develop the black and white photo of this age and indeed those tinted sepia contained silver. This silver is still present in these photos and you can see it when you tilt the image against the light. Some angles show the blacks as being a bluish tint. In some cases of restoration scanning this type of photo causes dense blue casts and the silver reflects light from the scanner creating difficulties for the restoration. Where you need to see the detail most, in the dark and shaded areas, it is just a sea of blue reflections. Evidence to correct this is noticeable in old galleries today where each photo tilts forwards hanging in its frame improve the viewing angle and reduce the effect.

In the photographers studios in 1910 – 1920 they may have used powder flash guns or depending on the set up natural light. The cameras still used relatively long exposures times which caused the subject to be become blurred on film. It would only take a blink at the wrong time or a wriggle and a ghostly blur would occur. In some group portraits this is evident where eyes show much paler and greyer than everyone else’s, or where the focus appear to be very soft on just one persons face. Powder flash would go some way to eliminating this as would flash bulbs when they were introduced nearer 1925-1930.

When I examine these old photos sometimes this has to be explained, as these details cannot realistically put back in or be recovered when they were never there in the first place. The great thing about these early photos though, is that they were often taken on larger format film which holds a great deal of detail. If you own negatives then it is these that can yield a superb reproduction, as do the prints taken from this type of film.

In the next post I will be taking a look at close ups of these photos and finding out what restoration work is involved.

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Coming up soon… In future blog posts I will be looking into this album.

I am going to see what restoration nightmares are in here. I will be talking about how it is not always good to have a silver lining or at least where certain photos are concerned and a look at photo studios of the past and problems the photographers faced.

When you get a photo as bad as this, it is seriously tempting to let a quality photo restoration service do it for you. But if you were to tackle this one it might be easiest to airbrush a new back ground or cheat by tightly cropping the photo so there is less work to do. This of course isn’t what restoring is all about.

It is about quality time restoring photos so they look like new from the time and period they were taken.

Patience is the key, its take a long time to fix a photo like this. Start with patching away the cracks that are on their own, giving larger and and larger areas to sample texture from when you patch some more.Think of the photo as a sliding block puzzle, you are simply moving areas from one place to another to replace a bit that is missing. Sounds easy does it not? Obviously there is a degree of care from where the replacement texture is taken from, so that the new section blends in well. It’s not much good patching a smooth section of sky with texture from somebody’s woollen sweater. Common sense and patience is the recipe for success here.

When it comes to rebuilding the facial areas or areas where you have to be creative with your patching, slow down. Take a look at what you have in front of you and with a bit of imagination and perhaps a rescale here and there, possibly a flip, feather and blend, you can fill in the gaps. You may have to retexture afterwards by first rubber stamping in the correct tone from a nearby source and then patching to regain a little texture.

In this case a nose tip had to be borrowed from another photo and blended in. The windows in the back ground had slight re structure and overall tone and definition was improved with dodge and burn in subtle amounts. A low opacity layer of sharpen was added to the finally repaired old photo. Now we have the quality photo restoration we were looking for. You may want to down sample from your high res scan and apply a slight sharpen again depending on the final reproduction size.

Neil Rhodes

Image-Restore.co.uk Providing quality photo restoration Surrey and Farnham area

If ever you look into having a photo restoration done, how do you know that you are going to have it done properly? You can look at the site that offers the restoration and look at their example images of “before” and “after” and surely if it looks good then that’s all there is to it. The price is right so why not go for it.

STOP! I will tell you why. Look closely at those “before” and “after” images. Think about what the restoration artist has done. Let us check the skill level of the restoration artist.

1. When replacing a back ground on a portrait. Has the background got the same tone and texture and grain as the part of the image that is left. Look carefully as there may be some tell tale signs of a quick fix. Halos or smudged lines around the original subject or person. There may also be cropping of the photo where the artist has eased the workload and trimmed off background that they didn’t want to deal with. Did you ask for that, and do you mind?

Image showing good texture where a restoration has been carried out correctly

2. Restoring details in the background. Are there strange repeat patterns in the background? Does it look like the grass is like a repeat pattern wall paper? Does the same bit of wood appear many times, or is that brick wall just a 10 times copy and repeated over and over to save time? Is there smudging or are there ill defined areas where the artist has simply blotted out details?

Image showing repeat patterns and bad texture where a restoration has been carried out incorrectly and with a lazy technique.

3. Does it look like it has been restored? When an image is very badly damaged, the artist will have to work hard to fix the damaged areas. Depending on the skill of the artist the image will look like it has been worked on. This will normally be where large areas of faces have been damaged or smooth tones or block colours have been divided by a tear or tape marks. A skilled artist will make sure that the tones and the texture match and that it does not just look like a lifeless block of colour.

Look out for these pointers when examining the work on display, if you detect any of this go somewhere else, as the skills probably aren’t there in the first place.

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Firstly it’s a good idea to de-saturate or grey-scale the image before starting. If you wish to end up with a sepia tone at the end, then we can apply a photo filter to colourise the image when we have finished.

Let’s look at what we have to do. Invent a window and rebuild the boards and sky.

Using the vanishing point filter, draw a grid that matches the perspective of the boards and house, notice in the original the boards converge to the left, so the grid must follow these converging lines.

Get familiar with the tools on palette, we will be using the clone tone with heal off. Start with the window. Using the clone tool clone the vertical sides of the window frame upwards. Until you reach what would be a good height for a sash window.

Swap back to normal photo shop window. Repair the right had corner of lower section. Using the selection tool make a selection around the corner section of the lower pane, top left corner. Feather the selection by 1.5 pixels and then cut and paste. Flip horizontally and rotate slightly to become the mended corner.

Now we have a full lower pane we can use for the top half. Select just the pane from the newly complete lower window with the selection tool. Feather again, cut and past. Position the new upper pane in place where it looks most natural. Now dirty the pane slightly by dodging back the highlights with a soft large brush. Now we need to add to and correct the top of the window. Select the window sill minus the shadow under it, feather and cut/paste. Re-scale the sill to make a wooden beam for the top part of the window frame and position.

Now it’s down to you to add texture by using either the clone tool set to a low opacity and a small brush or the patch tool to grab some grain and texture from suitable wooden areas around to make the new wood work like it’s always been there. Assess the shadows under ledges to make sure they are all consistent with the look of the image and strength of the sun.

Swap back to vanishing point filter. Let’s fix the boards. In the original photo the boards to the right are significantly lighter than those to left, so when we clone them over we would have a house that looks spookily similar on both sides and not natural enough.

So although cloning them across is a good starting point using vanish point still, it might be better to use what we have on the right and clone the up and then borrow the texture and dark markings of those on the left to blend them in a bit. To blend over the texture from the right hand boards use a clone tool set to medium soft and around 50-70% opacity, vary this if the results do not look convincing. You can the use the same method to make sure the shadows between the boards look natural.

Finally when you have done with the boards just clone up the sky, select the bottom edge border of the photo and use it to make one at the top. Flatten the image and rotate and correct the perspective.

Another fine digital restoration example brought to you from image-restore

Done.

Neil

Providing a Quality photo restoration service

Ok so have the images restored and they look great but they are a little flat in tone.

A great trick for enhancing the blacks and making a great contrast to the highlights is to add a separate adjustment layer for colour balance. Convert your image to RGB

In this layer adjust the shadows so that they appear tinted slightly with blue. So add around 10-15 blue and 10-15 cyan on the sliders.

Now switch over to the highlights and warm them up, so use the sliders to add around 10-15 red and 10-30 yellow.

Now take a look at the before and after. It jumps out at you now doesn’t it! You can of course tone down this effect by adjusting the opacity of the layer in your layers palette.

Subtlety is the key as always

Neil

Providing photo restoration service uk

Photo Restoration - Tackling Underwater Images

You arrived back from the scuba diving holiday of a lifetime and … oh your photos are not what you thought, blue wishy-washy, lacking in punch and clarity. Sadly this is a property of water, it has the unfortunate ability to filter out the red spectrum of light and thus the further down you go the stronger the effect until eventually there is no red left in the available light. Your pictures will no doubt be a beautiful blue by now.

Correcting this effect is not as simple as it sounds. There is great deal of tweaking to be done. As your reds have completed disappeared it will be a good idea to check the channels of your image. Take a look at the red, it’s all but disappeared, it will probably be almost completely black and devoid of detail. Here it gets tricky, or at least finding the right combination of actions to take, requires some experience.

Basically the red channel is useless and needs to be recreated from scratch. We can borrow information from the green and blue channels to build one. Once this is done the reconstruction can begin. Sadly at this stage I cannot give a clear and concise procedural walk through, as each image has to be treated differently. I did try and produce an action for this but alas whilst working well for some images it ruined others and have therefore concluded it way more involved than my simplistic explanation.

I have seen this technique put to very good use and I will be back with the ins and outs once my schedule allows me to bring to you the mysteries of photo restoration and the science that fixes those underwater blues.

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A useful tool in any photo restoration is the vanishing point tool. Good for any perspective based restoration. Examples where to use this tool are for use with buildings or car parks, roads, paving, or windows, etc. In Photoshop CS2 / CS3 it is found under Filter/vanishing point form the top menu.

Basically it is a tool that allows you to draw a grid over your image and follow the lines of anything in perspective. In a recent image I removed some people from a car park with a large wooden clad building in the background.

The tool allows you to follow the vanishing perspective line along and clone along those lines. In the case of a wooden clad building the planks of wood along the buildings side get smaller as they go into the distance. People stand in the car park along side the building and are in the way.

With the vanishing point tool you can remove these people fairly simply by drawing the grid making sure it covers the people and a large enough area to sample the clone tool from. Keep the grid following the lines of perspective and if the grid turns blue you know you have done it right. To ensure the grid turns blue make sure your verticals are parallel to each other. Now when you clone over anything within the grid it can be cloned in perspective. Thus the planks down the side if the building are restored naturally over the people.

To tidy up the car park and to make sure the parking bays continue naturally through the image I added another plane to the perspective grid. You can drag out the handles from the grid to create another grid more or less at right angles (well in perspective terms anyway) and repeat the process in the car park.

Obviously there is more to it when it comes to cloning but by now your method of selection and cloning abilities should be up to scratch. Rebuilding the shrubs without repetitive patterns in them and any other flora and fauna to fill in the gaps.

Your done, congratulate yourself!

Hope this tip helps.

Neil

Providing a quality photo repair and restoration service uk

Restoring any photo should be pleasure not a chore. If a water damaged photo should need restoring, perhaps one recovered from a flood or a rainy camping trip then provided it is dry it can be scanned and restored like any other damaged photo. Of course the extent of damage may mean you have to replace an entire background by using the method of selection I described in the importance of selection . Once you have cut out you subjects you can choose and replace the background. Should the subject not be a person but a landscape then it may be better to approach the restoration from another angle.

See if you can find out when the scene was, what country and what time of year, this may help with the types of trees, flowers and surroundings you may need to research before restoring the flood damage. You may even find a similar scene in a reference book or even live near by where you can glean clues as to what things may have looked like.

If it is an old photo with people in a scene and the water damage means some of the clothes or objects have been distorted or lost altogether within the image then you can again get researching. Perhaps the owner knows what the people were wearing or have another photo that is not damaged you can use for reference. Photos of the period will give you great references to fashion and clothing and what types of hardware was around at the time. You may need to replace a car, rake, wheel barrow or pram, get as inventive as you can.

You may well be up against some really challenging colour bleeds and awkward colour fades, but with the usual patch tool and some selective feathering around the bled colour on a separate layer you should be able to colour correct these fairly easily.

Remember with the power of Photoshop and skill anything is possible. If it looks like too much to take on then let the professionals tackle it for you. Remember no matter how bad it is even if it if is something you wouldn’t normally have taken a second look at dont throw it away it.

Once again good luck and remember, flooded photos are not flushed away memories but restorable ones.

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Instant makeovers, years taken off, digital plastic surgery, its all possible but just how far do you go?

Facial restorations involving removing wrinkles, reducing pores, retouching eyes, removing blemishes etc. should be done with discretion. Its very tempting to attack the image with gusto sweeping away all evidence of anything natural and end up with a porcelain skin that looks a little too much like a wax work that a persons face.

Start by reducing the shadows, cleaning away any blemishes that would not be natural, perhaps reducing fine lines around the eyes but not completely removing them. Even out the skin tone next with an overlay filter on a separate layer. Perhaps you might use the patch tool if you have some good texture to sample, to smooth out the tones. Brighten up the eyes and remove the shine from the skin. Sometimes you may have to redraw the catch-lights in the eyes but make sure they look natural, not just blobs of white, shape them a little and add some transparency. Reduce pores by either another layer set Gaussian Blur or targeting the larger ones individually, if you have a large tablet you can actually work quite quickly reducing them with a dab of the pen set up correctly, this way no detail is lost on the face at all.

Above all else don’t over do it. In previous posts I have mentioned before, it must look like nothing has changed, nothing at all. If it looks like it has been restored, you haven’t done it well enough. This industry is plentiful with wannabe retouchers, but to stay up the top there must be no evidence of cloning or restoring anywhere. If you keep everything on separate layers you can always change the opacity to vary the intensity of each step to keep a natural look.

Retouched face before Retouched face after

Good luck and take it slow and steady and keep it natural.

Neil

Providing a quality photo repairs uk

Photo Restorations are essential

“Oh gee, I guess I’d better get this restored it’s looking tatty” - No, no, no! Photo restorations are way more important than that, they are essential, they may seem trivial at the time, but you are preserving an important part of family history, your family will have to continue on the memory for their family. If left un-restored the negative or print could end up just that, un-restorable and future generations won’t have that vital visual link to their past. So even if it’s a simple retouch and removal of a few scratches, or a touch up of a face or torn up, faded photo that needs a complete cleanse and restore don’t leave it, act now!

The first thing to do is to protect the image with acid free tissue or paper to prevent any further damage by the immediate environment. Place your photos in a good sturdy album and don’t mount them using stamp hinges or tape, you do not want anything stuck to the photos to make it difficult to remove when you want to get them restored. Try using photo corners but try and find paper type if you can. If you have to write something about the photo try and write next to them not on the back.

Then get it restored, but don’t just get one print get two. The reason behind this isn’t always obvious. If you give a copy of your newly restored photo to another family member then it’s more likely you precious memories will survive for generations to come as you are not the sole owner. Far too often all the family’s heirlooms are kept in one place and should the worst happen, such as fire or increasingly these days flood, then all is lost. The sensible choice has to be two copies.

Secondly get a digital copy too. It’s all very well getting the prints done but if you get a CD/DVD with your images on then you can keep a digital archive. Don’t just leave them on a CD though; if you upgrade your PC make sure you copy the CD/DVD to the very latest of backup storage. First it was floppy disk, then CD, then DVD and we are already into Blue-Ray and who knows what’s coming. Just make sure it’s on the latest media, in this fast paced world you never know when your storage will become obsolete.

Finally if you have one why not upload it to an on-line photo-share or online storage space, you can then share it with the world if you want and let you relatives know it’s there. With the massive uptake on creating and investigating family trees and your files on line, well indexed and labelled, will enable others who have family connections to find their relatives too. Who knows maybe they will get the bug and take the plunge to get their old images restored too?

So simply

1. Protect what’s left
2. Get it restored
3. Get Two copies
4. Take a copy to CD Rom
5. Share/store the photos on line

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Due to a recent spate of thoughtlessness i managed to delete this post so i have now re-posted it , slightly revised as its written from scratch

When carrying out photo restoration and restoring an old photograph quite often pieces of it need to be patched up and healed or cloned. To do this you may just grab the clone brush and clone over, but care and planning with sections can create a neater and more convincing job.

If you need to clone up to an object, its best to select the object first creating a barrier so that no cloning will go beyond that point. The selection should be based on the sharpness of the image. By this I mean how sharp or how much in focus the image is. For example if you blow up an image to 200-300% and see how far the pixels merge or overlap between to objects. It may be in a high resolution image this is only 1 pixel but in a lower resolution or scan of an old photograph with large grain, it may be 3 or 4. It is this “focus” that you image selection should be based on.

By using the focus you can feather your selection and clone up to that point with a realistic edge that suits the image you are working on. Used in conjunction with the “heal” tool this can be a very good method for avoiding the smudge effect you get when healing too close to sections with contrast. If you haven’t come across this before its very annoying and this simple technique avoids all the undo and re-cloning you may have repeated over and over not quite understanding why it does it.

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