Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘image restoration’ Category

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.

The following offer has been extended to give you continuing value for money!

£5 off and FREE 10×8 inch print with any Grade 3 restoration

Order one or more Grade 3 restoration and a print, and get one 10×8* inch print Free and £5 off!

Quote this order code G31085OFF when ordering.

Valid till 13 of April 2010

* Subject to the condition and size of the original photo

 see our current photo restoration offer

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