Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘image restoration’ Category

Picture restoration of old rolled up photo

Often It is asked if it is possible to perform picture restoration. I can restore pictures but it is only a digital copy of your pictures that I restore, not the physical picture itself. Actually restoring the pictures surface is something best left to photo preservation experts found in museum departments.

The ultimate goal of having your picture restored is to allow it to be digitally copied and restored so any number of reprints can be made and handed around the immediate family or interested parties. If the photo is of particular historical interest or of genealogical importance, then the restoration is something that should be considered if the preservation of your family history is to be ensured.

For example, restoring an old cracked and rolled up photo would require it to be unrolled. If it is brittle, the picture to be restored will break up when forced against its natural curled up state. It will need to be relaxed and opened slowly. The way to restore the picture back to its original position is to introduce some moisture. A risky undertaking if not performed properly.

The best way to do this would be in a controlled environment, properly monitored to avoid over saturation. Picture restoration in this manner is achieved by using de-ionised water vapour introduced into a small chamber or tent, to slowly moisten the paper to relax it and ease out the rolled photo. This could be done with an ultrasonic humidifier or home humidifier unit, which is perfect for introducing small, yet controlled amounts of moisture with no additional contaminants associated with plain tap water. Depending on the thickness of the picture this could take days to do, I read of one case taking 10 days. Keeping the area and environment clean and free from airborne containments is paramount because if the there are any mould spores present, this is an ideal environment for them to flourish.

Slowly over a period of hours or days, the roll can be unfurled as the moisture penetrates the paper it can be weighed down. The time this takes depends on the picture to be restored, the thickness of the paper, or size of the final photo.

The picture restoration can be carried out when the photo has been flattened and dried. To strengthen the fragile paper further it can be backed with acid free parchment and any flakes or cracked pieces can be restored to the picture with acid free glues or a starch paste. This restoring of the picture can also take time, as some can be like a jigsaw to replace the individual flakes ready for the digital picture restoration. Preservation artists such as those found in museums have immense patience and go to great lengths to replace as many of the original pieces as possible.

Once such museum I have contacted before, the Royal Academy of Arts in London perform this kind of dry repairs, but have yet to confirm if they have the moisture picture restoration facility.

Once in this dry state the digital picture restoration can begin whereby the picture is scanned and then restored as in the conventional photo or picture restoration process.

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!

Sometimes your camera may leak light onto the film other than through the shutter, perhaps it was faulty or cracked of broken. If it were black and white film it would be relatively easy to fix. If it were colour film this may be the result.

Fixing this much leak is not as simple as it sounds. There are many ways to go about this but as with any task in Photoshop it’s what works best for the given task ahead.  For this image some conventional restoration work or patching and cloning as well as using the colour channels, masks for adding back  colour and detail from the original were used.

We can look at the individual colour channels to see which one is a good starting point for the restoration. What is most noticeable is the lack detail in this area, low in density and sharpness. This will be addressed later.

Here with the blue channel extracted and the original colour image thrown over the top, you can see how easy it would be to just clone all the colour back in setting the layer to “colour”. This is where the density of the underlying damage needs to be fixed. By selecting these and changing the levels and tones they can be evened out, although the banding, will have to be blended out later with some overlay dodge and burn layers.

Once the main areas have been balanced back to the tones  of the undamaged areas the colour can be added back with the original layer set to “colour”. Surrounding colours can be cloned back in, or sampled and painted back in with a brush set to colour mode.

Once this has been achieved, the soft details need to be address with conventional patching and pasting sections over. To give an even tone to rigid inflatable, I had to copy a section from the front and paste and warp and set layer to darken, to add some shading and detail back in. Once the skirt of the boat was fixed the colours then had to be adjusted with hue saturation and exposure to get the correct glow to match the suns reflection on the bow.
The same technique was used to add details back to the other blurred areas.

Those of you who know photoshop may be asking why there is no full, step by step of this restoration? The reason is that the original file was  10600 pixels wide! And once you get those layers going in Photoshop the file soon crept up to 1000Mb and beyond, so each stage was flattened to keep my processor from going up in smoke!
The final steps were to remove the banding from the dividing lines between all the varying layers of light leak. This was done with a combination of dodge and burn overlay, and cloning areas from other parts of the image to piece it back together. As with any awkward photo restoration this does take time and is therefore not cheap.

Fixing a light leak on colour film