Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for October, 2008

With the photographic features in mind and the photo repair angle in our heads is it really worth it?

There are a few features that have been added that might aid us photographers aiming to do photo repairs. Notably the first is the graphic acceleration of some operations. However reading deeper into the blurb and some reputable reviews, the graphics acceleration is not actually going to help us photographers very much. The rotation and zoom controls are accelerated by your graphics card but not the filters. The only way these will speed up is with a faster processor and even then I am not sure this helps that much. As us photo repair men use the filters quite a lot for selections and making etc then this is of little use.

Another feature that has been added is something called content aware scaling. This enables an image to be stretched or shrunk without altering the content of the image and maintain the content in proportion by removing data that is not needed.  I have included an example of a BMW car that I squashed. Notice the wheels are still round and most of the cars features still look normal. This feature can be used for making wider format images quite successfully especially if you want to stretch a landscape. However, this is not worth the upgrade particularly when you can find this tool, “Resizor” elsewhere on the net and free. You may have to resourceful in your search but it is there. This feature could also be used to fit an old photo to a more conventionally proportioned modern day paper size.

Content aware scale

So what else if there to offer? The last feature that I noted was colour range selection by local clusters. It is a fancy way to select colours with similar colour range within a specific area. The zone of the area can be controlled. Once again this is something you can quite happily do with a circular faded mask and then select your colour range within that area.

Over all then is worth the upgrade? In short no, not if you are just performing photo repair like me. Don’t waste your money and stick with CS2 orCS3

You may find that the photos that you want to repair are in more than one piece. When scanning an old photo with the intention of repairing it you may want to check what your scanner is up to again. See Saving you images correctly. When you scan two bits of a photo you may find that the two halves end up looking completely different. The tones and exposure and even colour may look great on one half and totally different on the other, what is going on?

When your scanner when set to automatic just like a digital camera set to “auto”, it will exposure and correct the image where and how it sees fit. Images with more dark tones in them, may be compensated for and end up lighter and vice versa for light images ending up darker. Colours may even change too.

It is best to set your scanner to manual and switch off all the automatic settings and keep the scanning resolution the same. Turn off the auto tone, brightness, contrast, colour sections and just scan in colour, as basic as you can get. This way both scans should end up the same in their tones and exposures and size. You can then be sure when you are trying to match up the two halves that they will meet easily and make the photo repair simpler too. In fact you can apply this technique when scanning large prints bigger than your scanner. Make sure you scan with around 25% overlap on each scan then this will give plenty to match up when getting your restorer to stitch them together again.

Photo repairs and fixing your old photos.