Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for June, 2009

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 will 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