Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘image restoration’ Category

So much can be achieved with photo restoration, just browse through the blog and the website to get broad spectrum of what is possible. Check through the lists below there may be a link with another article or web page you haven’t seen yet.

• Repairing and restoring cracks
• Repairing and restoring folds and creases
• Replacing missing pieces
• Restoring flaked emulsion
• Stitching pieces back together
• Correcting water damage
• Removing mould and paint
• Removing “proof” stamps
• Removing paper texture

Retouching faces or bodies

• Retouching and colouring eyes
• Removing or adding hair
• Removing unwanted shadows
• Removing blemishes and wrinkles
• Smoothing skin tone
• Slimming the figure, removing the shine from faces

• Adding (digitally hand colouring) colour to a black and white photo
• Removing colour from a photo
• Enhancing colours in a faded photo
• Removing colour casts and correcting colour
• Correcting film fogging
• Repairing stains

Combining and montage

• Adding people or objects to photos
• Removing people or objects from photos
• Using two or more photos to make one photo
• Using objects, people or anything to make something artistic.

Other possibilities

• Distorting reality and other photoshop wizardry

Restoration requests have been many and one the most in depth and challenging was one presented to me by a young lady who had not seen her wedding photos for a long while, nor really in any great depth. Due to some family disturbance they would have brought back bad memories and now ready, she examined them only to be disappointed. In this project I

moved the tide further down the beach, removed creases from the wedding dress, removed bits of flab sticking out in various places, shiny faces were reduced. I rebuilt the foreground of a restaurant scene to remove a person, in all retouched and manipulated over 250 photos!

So what is not possible?

It is not possible to:

Focus a completely out of focus picture. (If it is an obviously out of focus photo it cannot be refocused)

Fixed a blurred photo. This would be where the camera moved when taking the photo or the subject moved. Moving the camera when depressing the shutter is more evident from the early days of photography when the film speed and resulting shutter speeds were slower. The moment evident in the photo is sort of a moving blur, normally in a down and up motion. Motion in single plain can sometimes be corrected, but it is so rare. Examples you may have seen on the internet are normally manufactured instances under ideal conditions, where the motion blur has a chance of being corrected.

Open closed eyes. Not without another set of open ones to replace them with.

Replace a head. Now we are getting silly, again not without another photo of that persons head

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.

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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 further 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, so the accompanying software is adding in pixels to make 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 restore 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.

If want to read further advice on saving and scanning see saving your image correctly

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.

For a short video on this topic see below.

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!