Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘fix my photo’ Category

A customer of mine recently sent me this photo.

correct a heavy colour fade

As you can see it is faded heavily in the middle due to sun exposure

Its always sad to see your photos face in this way but all is not lost.

The first task was to see if I could recover any colour at the scanning stage. This saves time if you can scan one image correctly for the outer section and one for the inner and combine the two. This did not work that well as the density of the tones were too light to get close to the correct colours. Abandoning that approach i tried adjustments layers, but they reveal no colour left that can be restored in the center section. The carpet and surrounding background have enough clues to give the colours to paint back into the photo but still  the densities need to be changed.

I selected the faded area with the selection tools and adjust the curves so that it resembled the tone of the outer section. To check this was spot on I painted a little of the cushion covers colour, on a separate layer, over the lighter area and adjusting the curves and matched it as close as possible with the darker, outer section.

With the burn tool for shadows and then mid tones, i set about burning the bits of background that didn’t quite match perfectly with the surrounding tones. From here on in I used lengthy techniques described in the previous 2 posts for colourising or adding colour to old photos. The final result is below.

Correct heavily faded colour

This took a fair while to complete but the result is more than worth it.!

If you wanted to read how to colour old photos and the associated techniques you can in Part 1 and Part 2 of colouring old photos.#

Colouring old photos can be done for as little as £25. The more complex they are the more it would cost. A typical examples is one or two people on a relatively simple background for £25.

When restoring a photo using Photoshop there are so many ways to repair damage that i thought i would take a typical example of a fold mark or crease and show the ways we can use to repair it.

One method we can use for fixing this damage would be to use the “patch tool”, normally good for correcting or replacing large areas of an image.

Using the Patch Tool

Using the patch tool in this way can sometimes result in smeared colour or tone contamination from nearby contrasting areas. To avoid this clone over any overly dark or light spots so when you outline the area to be patched, the outline runs through an area or similar tone. You can patch through nearly a entire image in this manner. The skill comes from knowing where to take the patch from as in a lot or circumstances there seems no obvious place to select a donor piece. Of course like any restoration there will be a fair bit of tiding up to do, such dodging and burning any areas that didn’t patch that well and possibly even using the clone tool to tidy up edges and add back some definition where the patches have left a soft edge.

Using the Clone Tool

Using the clone tool is probably the favorite amongst most of us who know something about Photoshop. It used to great effect and has many options besides the simple clone I have shown here. For example it can be used in conjunction with “darken” or “lighten” to give great effect when cloning up to contrasting edges or over dark or light patches.

Other methods you could use are the Spot Healing Brush Tool or he Healing Brush. These can used to great effect when replacing soft or blurred sections of an image with texture from other part of the image, say to add texture or grain back to blurred face or clothing. Here they work fairly well but not as good as the clone.

Using the Spot Healing Tool

Of these methods they all can be used together especially when patching up or rebuilding a far more complex image. An image such as a child posing in a Victorian photographers studio in a grand chair, with a leg missing and the wooden scrolls damaged on the engravings. This would need careful use of all the techniques above. With these more complex rebuilds, artistic abilities come into play. The ability to see light and dark for shape and form and subtle colours that push and pull detail into and out of the picture. Its these skills that can used to rebuild and restore the image to its former state.

Is it image restoration, picture restoration or photo restoration? In fact its all three. It just depends on how you interpret the phrase.

An image restoration or whichever you prefer to call it may take the shape of colouring an image. I have shown an example of this before in image restoration colouring but I thought you might like to see the colour being added back slowly in an animation. I am sorry it’s not very good quality but I’ve yet to work out how to make a smooth movie from .jpgs

Rather than show all the frames separately this seemed like the best way to do it. The day was early spring not long after snow in the uk so the colours for this type of light and time of year were used.

Click image to play colour animation, then click back arrow on your browser to return here.



With image restoration hand colouring all you do is set up a “new layer” above the main image and fill with a colour, set a layer mask to “hide all” and set the layer properties to “colour”.

image restoration hand colour layers

You can see in this image how the layer above is set to “colour”, and the black mask or the “hide all” mask has been painted on with white to reveal the colour that has been hidden. Once you have the first one set up you can make a whole bunch of these with all the colours you are going to use and then its a case a paint them in slowly and carefully. Its best done with a low opacity brush and build up the colour, its so easy to over do it. You can also play with the layer properties and change them from the drop down box to “overlay” or “colour burn” or one of the many others to get a better colouring result. There are many modes to choose from and the results vary depending on the opacity of the layer. Opacity is how see through that layer is, thus affecting the intensity of the effect.

I know it sounds complicated but its best just to set up a basic image and start colouring the more you play with it the more you find out what works best for you own image restoration.

For a complete guide on colouring an old photo see colourising or tinting and old photo a post showing in greater detail how to do this. It is in two part so be sure to read both!