Photo Restoration Blog

A few days ago I was presented with the task of restoring a very badly damaged old board based photo. It had been kept in a garage and had been subjected to moisture and excessive heat. This has caused the unprotected photo emulsion to first crack and then flake off, leaving the photo in a seemingly unrepairable state.

This is the top left quarter of the photo in question. Other parts top right, bottom_left, bottom right. As you can see they are very badly damaged.

In this close up you can see the flaked emulsion and cracks very clearly, there is not much original image left!

The normal way to tackle this would be to use some sort of de-crack filter. The only problem with using this is that it cant deal with such a vast amount of white, yes it will work on small cracks but not ones as big as these.  In using such a filter it will only go so far and other methods to repair the damage and cracks have to be found.

It turned out that a clever use of the patch tool and one of my own custom actions, (sorry top secret I cant post it) helped me fill in a vast amount of cracks, but it had to be small sections at a time, to retain the correct tones throughout the damaged parts of the image.

The background was replaced with a custom graduated fill and then wallpaper and door frame details were added, with a mask around the main figure to blend it all in. The grain was then matched as best as possible and the foreground tones and shadows were evened out and enhanced.

Once compete a surprising amount of detail showed through the maze of cracked and flaked emulsion.

Ok I know I was due to write a post on photo restoration again but I had to tell you about this fab tool.

By definition macro photography has a shallow depth of field. It is annoying as you cannot easily increase it. With a Canon compact digital camera, CHDK, a clever little tool can be added to the memory card to give your camera extra functionality. With this new amazing array of features you can set the camera to perform clever sequences of shots. One of which is the ability to focus to the minimum distance in macro mode and then take a shot and the another every few millimetres or so.

“OK great so how is this going to improve my depth of field?”

With the dozen or so shots you have just taken you can then use PhotoShop to “stack” them and merge them down cleverly using all the bits in focus from all the images giving you amazing depth of field. It is truly a great tool!

If you really want to get into this then just search Wiki for it and you should be able to learn all you need to know.

Thanks Wiki!

Many thanks for sticking with the Blog! I know its a bit erratic at times with a photo restoration post here and art tutorial there, like anything it takes work to maintain it. I really appreciate everyone who takes time to read. The most popular post is the tutorial on making an eye in photoshop and not a photo restoration entry. As this is what many of you have been viewing I have added more art based entries to satisfy your thirsts. The next entry wil be back on track with another photo restoration article.

Back soon.

Sorry to everyone who has been following me on photoshoptalent.com, their website has been down for the last week “under maintenance”, any links I have to them are broken. Hopefully photoshoptalent will sort out this problem soon. If not I will upload all the images on my photo restoration blog so I no longer have to rely on them.

Update: They are now up and running again under pxleeyes.com All data was lost so none of you would have seen all the entries. I have listed them below.

Acorn made from brass fixings

Birdhouse made from bits of a birdhouse

Jet, foreground and middle ground added to a snow scene

Same scene as the previous one but hole and foreground added

cracked paint texture and lightning added to snow scene

Snow added, it was summer before I added snow!

Lengthy removing of trees and moss, added lizard leg and head and new background and cloud smoke

Made from a chrome spoon and spatula.

I am sure I have missed a few. If I find the original images that these were made from I will add them in.

Hope you like them

The following offer has been extended to give you continuing value for money!

£5 off and FREE 10×8 inch print with any Grade 3 restoration

Order one or more Grade 3 restoration and a print, and get one 10×8* inch print Free and £5 off!

Quote this order code G31085OFF when ordering.

Valid till end of July 2009

* Subject to the condition and size of the original photo

Order your photo restoration now!

Another never ending staircase. I had another crack at the never ending staircase and this is the result. See the link for a larger version of the never ending staircase

Scrapbooking, Genealogy, family trees and digging around for old photos  is very much on the mind of many people today. There are many publications on the magazine shelves and several TV series to keep reminding us of how important our family histories are.

Making a family tree is not all about names it is about photos as well. The visual side of the ancestry helps with putting a face to the names. To help smarten up your family tree arrange your photos or portraits alongside the names on the tree, so when you can’t remember what great uncle Cartwright looked like, he is right there for you. Of course don’t stick down  the original photos get your photos copied and restored and a digital copy to make an on-line family tree for your relatives to share. Keep the original safe and sound away from sunlight and in a dry place.

TOP TIP: If you want to see great uncle Cartwright above the fireplace then have your original photo restored and reproduced, so you can display the reproductions around the house in prominent, well lit places, will no fear of further fading and damage.

Once you have developed a set of photo restoration skills you can use them to create a realistic photomontage.

In the following photoshop tutorial I will help you create a never ending staircase.

Never ending staircase

Photo restorations are my speciality but today I thought I would create a tutorial on making a never ending staircase from PhotoShop, Textured with wood, stone, grass or whatever you choose. Sometimes when you see photo restorations, you wonder how they were done, its the same for illusions. Here is how to make your own photo montage illusion.

Create a document in photo shop around 4000 x 2000 pixels. File / new / and fill in the pixels width and height.

We need to show the rulers and change to centimetres.

View / rulers Then right click on the now visible ruler and select centimetres.

We need to show the gird now. View / show grid

Now go to View / Snap to / Grid, to make sure the lines we draw are all consistent.

To check that your screen settings are the same as mine go to edit / preferences / unit and rulers

copy these settings in the above image

Back to the image.

On a new layer draw with the polygon lasso tool from the tools palette, a diamond. Use 5×3 squares per quarter to draw your diamond shape. This gives us an angle of just about 30 degrees which is very important for this to work.

On new layers, draw the other two shapes as per the image above. Now merge the layers. Select the freshly drawn layers in the layers palette and merge them using Layer / merge layers.

Copy the layer and paste and repeat this and arrange the steps as the image below.

Select all these layers in the layers pallet and duplicate them all. Right click in the layers palette and select, duplicate layers. With the layers still selected flip them. Edit / transform / flip horizontal. Use this process by ordering your layers and copying and pasting to get the result below.

Now let’s use something to make to the steps look more real.

Find a picture of a stone slab or a piece of wood, plastic, metal or even grass and cut it out into the shape we first drew, (the diamond and its edges). You can do this on a separate layer and change the opacity of the layer in your layers palette so you can see the original diamond step underneath. Using wood this can be achieved fairly easily. You may need to use the warp or scale tools, or liquefy (sorry I won’t be explaining how to use these tools here - but search the net I am sure you find what you are looking for)

Now repeat the steps we used to create the stair case and position your steps above the others and you will have your staircase. Now use it creatively! You can experiment with amount of steps just by shortening the sides of the stair case using the grid we first set up.

Here is one in stone! I created this myself with some stone slabs and some clever cloning and shading.

A larger version of this optical illusion never ending staircase

A larger version of this optical illusion never ending staircase

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial brought to you by A quality photo restoration service www.image-restore.co.uk restorations of old and damaged photos.

Photo restorations on line are easy to come by and when it comes to buying I have always bought local wherever possible, but it is easy to shop on-line isn’t it? Web shopping has one drawback, it is not always easy to tell if the company is using UK labour. Before you log on to order on-line, check whether the labour used is in the UK. If it is not obvious the likelihood is it’s foreign. Just because it’s a high street chain you grew up with a and regularly shop with, you may find if you ask enough questions, the labour is farmed to foreign, low wage companies.

As a result UK businesses want your custom even more and go out of their way to provide the best service and quality of work, so why not use them.

Why go miles in the car for a “cheap service”, when you add up the costs of mileage and shoddy workmanship, it costs more than a local, quality service. Support your local businesses or they may not be there to help you in the future. The jobs will disappear and the economic infrastructure of your local area will crumble.

As the financial climate changes and the UK economy suffers and prices rise it is more important than ever to remember you should support your UK Photo Restoration services. Without your support local UK companies can and do suffer.

If you want your local services to continue to serve you, use them! Consider what would happen to our lives without those services and if we continue to use facilities and labour abroad.

We urge you to Keep It Local and buy UK based Photo Restoration services.

For the those of you that have read down this far, as a special incentive to keep photo restorations local and in the UK here is a special offer.

£5 off and FREE 10×8 inch print with any Grade 3 restoration

Order one or more Grade 3 restoration and a print, and get one 10×8* inch print Free and £5 off!

Quote this order code G31085OFF when ordering.

Valid till end of May 2009

* Subject to the condition and size of the original photo

Grab your local photo restoration with money off. (valid till end of May 2009)

With the cost of living ever increasing electronics manufacturers are more than happy to produce ever cheaper equipment for our everyday needs. Cheap printer, scanner, copiers are everywhere these days, even in your local village supermarket. This is where the trouble starts. They do seem like a bargain don’t they? All that functionality for under £40 pounds!

STOP. If you are thinking of buying this to scan in your family photos for archiving them and restoration when you have the time or when you can afford a photo restoration service then please take my advice, think again. Why? The optics on these devices are designed for everyday scanning and printing. When scanning an image to produce a high resolution file for restoration, the software and optics together often produce a “fluffy” scan.

Let me explain. On an original photo, take a look at the dark and light areas between two objects or surfaces; say a dark door and light wall, or the rim of someone’s spectacles against their pale skin. The edge between the two is sharp and straight. Now scan it on your new scanner copier printer and blow up that section, it’s now a fluffy line with little definition. If you then save it with medium to heavy JPEG compression, this will only go to destroying what little detail is left.

What is happening is the substandard optical glass in the scanner is being supplemented with software interpolation.  As the optics are not up to scratch to give a good, high resolution scan the accompanying software is adding in pixels to made the scan bigger. Two wrongs don’t make a right, one just makes the other worse.

Does it really matter? Well if you try to make a perfect circle from Lego bricks, it is very hard to do. When a face needs rebuilding in a restoration and the only pieces are “fluffy” edged, then it is very hard to do and much better result can be obtained from a high quality scanner. Better to make a good scan from a professional scanner and spend less time restoring it. If you are using me to restore your photos then it will cost less if it takes less time.

Image-Restore for fixing your photos

This is a follow on post from my original matching grain article a while ago.

This is just one example of how to match grain when replacing a back ground or perhaps any part of an image.

Look at this image, it is part of a man’s shoulder and the background could do with evening out or replacing altogether.

Here I have just selected and deleted the back ground to white. It does not look at all right.

Above a blur might clean up the background. Whilst evening out the background it still does not match very well.

Here I have added some grain (noise) but it still does not match. If I apply a blur to this then we can achieve a better result.

With a slight blur its much better and using the correct selection technique for the original background selection it looks fairly convincing. Using this matching grain technique and varying the amounts of grain and blur ratios and perhaps even repeating the process a few times along with varying the type of noise, we can achieve different  patterns of grain to suit nearly every situation.

A big thank you to all of you for posting your reviews on FreeIndex. You have now posted over 100 positive reviews showing how much you appreciate our photo repair services. A special thank you and congratulations goes to Mr Richard Haskell from Hertfordshire who receives a FREE grade 2 photo restoration as he placed our 100th review!

See your latest photo restoration reviews!

Thanks again to you all!

Image-Restore

Rather off topic of photo repair today, but still interesting and to do with Photoshop, I have been entering PhotoShop tallent Competitions and you can see my entries below. I have had 2 seconds and one 4th place so far. I am now hooked so keep looking for more entries.

4th place - created from a stack of cups and a Bonsai tree

2nd place winner - frost and deer and extra sun rays added to a woodland scene.

 Or visit here for all my entries. Check back regularly to see more entries

All recent entries were lost due to a server meltdown on photoshoptalent. Now renamed pxleyes.com I am just deciding whether I should go somewhere else for competitions.

I have been restoring a fair few black and white photos on fibrous cardboard recently. This type of photo seems to have had the light sensitive emulsion painted onto the board and then exposed to light.  I would suggest that such large sizes of paper could not be made so the photographer simply grabbed a stable matt cardboard base and painted on the chemicals. The resulting image is a very soft focused photo without any hard defined edges.

With this photo board it has a matt finish and absorbs moisture very well.  If you have any very large old photos, perhaps stored in the loft, still in a frame in a plastic bag, please dig them out and put the somewhere dry and warm before they suck up the moisture in the cool damp air, circulating around your loft.  As they do this they swell a little and often grow mould of varying types.  The fine black soot-like mould and dry white, spidery feather-like mould, possibly mildew.  Neither of these do your photos any good, its best to dry them out slowly and then dust them off very lightly with a soft artist’s paint brush.  Once the worst is off, use a little photographer’s canned air to blow away the spores, but do this outside otherwise they will just settle in the house and not too close to the photo either.

Once it’s all clean get your photo restoration done. The process of degradation is already happening and there is not a lot you can do to stop it!