Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘old images that need restoring’ Category

When i get old photos that need to be restored and the photo is tattered and torn, with a stained and faded background, perhaps with cracks and tears, it would be very tempting to replace it.

Short answer don’t!

I get two or three emails a day from wannabe restoration artists who replace backgrounds routinely. Frankly I am not a fan of this practice. Most are done very badly, with the old, ‘render clouds’ filter and then over blurred with no attempt to match the grain.

Take time to repair the scratches, and tears, correct the fading and stains and when your done with the initial clean up you may find it hasn’t improved that much. Try experimenting with the dust and scratches filter to even out the tones in the background. Then when you have found a setting that works, add a layer mask and reveal the restored image through the cleaned background. You may need to match in some grain at this final stage. The background should now look much more convincing than if you simply used a filter to produce some random, over smoothed clouds.

Photographers have been taking Panoramas for years, school photos and groups of large people were often shot in panorama, army, navy, military groups and schools. The longest so far I have restored is 53 inches wide!, 7 inches short of the widest print I can have made. The subject was the 17 windmills of Kinderdijk – Kinderdyke in Holland. The photographer had shot the scene on wide format film, at a guess on 6cm roll film and used a rotating camera to turn the film and the camera head at the same time to expose a length of film long enough to produce a photo 53 x 10 inches long. Alas it was left outside in the rain in the frame and stuck to the glass and had to be scraped off in order to be scanned. After intense restoration and at 47 Million pixels it was re printed on high quality archive ink jet paper. I am sorry but at present I have not had permission to display the photo.

Typical damage right across the whole panorama.

The above is a small section from the far right hand side of the panorama showing just how detailed it is!

More often photos of regiments, war photos,  pupils in the entire school were photographed in this manner. Normally this type of photo is stored rolled up and in the loft. Moisture in the air and the constant heat and cold will have made the paper brittle, so when it is unrolled it may crack. Be careful it may break up. Should you decide to get it restored then it will have to be unrolled to be scanned. If you are posting it please put the rolled photo into a piece of large diameter tube, a carpet roll is best, or roll loosely and put in a card board box, padded out with tissue. A reunion of old army fellows, or royal navy chums often calls for the photos to be pulled out from storage but be prepared for some damage to be evident but do not fear as they can be restored. If there are many faces in the image, perhaps as many as 500 or more and the damage runs through the faces then the image can take some time and money to restore. If complete faces are missing and fully restored photo is required then the only way to fill in the gaps is with another face.

• Yes Panorama images can be restored

• Post them rolled up in a carpet tube

• They will cost much more than a normal 10×8 to restore

• They will be re reprinted on archive quality paper with archive inks up to 60 inches wide

I hope this helps

Neil

Restoring photos of your pets is just as important as restoring photos of your family. Well they are family aren’t they. Here I am showing the progress through restoring photo a dog.

The photo is heavily damaged but with some careful thought it can be restored.

The dogs toe pad has been replaced with the large black foot pad but scaled down and rotated and squashed. Above that some shadow has been cloned into the white space as in picture 1

You can see the muzzle has been cleaned up a bit here, using the patch tool and clone tools.

I have also copied the yellow dog toy from the left and pasted it to the right. I pasted again and flipped the yellow ball and with the patch and clone rebuilt the right hand side of the toy. I made sure there was some flash shadow around the ball in a slightly red tinted shadow to match the other side.

Finished cleaning up the muzzle and shadow underneath with clone tools and patch.

Here I have used the left side of the leg and clone upward towards the ball. I flipped this leg edge and used it for the right side.

Fortunately the customer had another photo of the dog lying down and I able to distort and warp the rear leg to replace much of the missing leg.

From the second photo I was able to use some belly fur and shade it with the dodge and burn tools. I added some flash shadows behind the newly added leg parts.

I reduced the red tint to the back and grey sofa and zoomed out for the finished product.

Hopefully you will look after your photos and not need to get your pet photos restored.

Original photos are made from layers. Old black and white photos were often made from fibre based paper. The base papers themselves would have been made in paper mills and the top coating of light sensitive chemical based sulphates called “baryta” was then added to produce the photographic paper. Once exposed to light and developed the positive image is embedded in the “baryta” or emulsion. If this top layer gets damaged there is no way to build up the layer and replace it. You cannot add wax or pen or ink, nothing comes close to the original emulsion. If some of the fibres of the paper have come away, then what? These cannot be replaced either, you cannot simply glue down new ones! Even if it were possible to put back a blank filler into the hole, there is no way to reproduce the grain structure that was there in the original, or the subtle tones and shading of the original photo.

The same goes for  colour photos, the resin or solid polyester top coat cannot be replaced with anything, I cannot be built up and restored. If there was a way to do this that was commercially available, there would not be so many digital photo restoration companies offering their digital restoration services today!

Sorry but it is not good news if own a damaged photo and want the original restored.

The question is, is it an original?

Genealogy and preserving photos isn’t new. The chances are somewhere in the family collection of old photos there are some that look a little smoother and shinier than the other, they still look old but just not as wrinkled.

Take a look at these carefully, can you see the scratches and creases, fold marks and tears but is the photo perfectly smooth? If so it is more likely to be a copy of an original. Unfortunately if this copy was made a while back when scanning technology was not so good, it may have been scanned with a first generation  scanner and printed in a high street lab when photo labs were numerous, around the 70’s and 80’s and 90’s. The chances are the tonal range within the reprint has changed dramatically from the original.

If you can turn the photo over, on the back may be printed “Fuji” or “Agfa” or “Kodak” in a faded font but clear as day, the paper itself is kind of plastic and not really papery at all. Very old photos were printed on paper made from pulp, made up of many layers of fibres, plastic papers just don’t have these and should be easy to spot.

In scanning the tones would have been averaged by the scanner and then when reprinting, the machines would have averaged again and much of the mid tones would have been lost. When it comes to making a restoration of this for the third time around, bringing out the details and enhancing the photo and making the restoration, is going to be somewhat disappointing,  than if it were direct from the original. The mid tones are what helps create shape and form to objects, the subtle shadows on some ones face,without these the photo will be just black and white and be very contrasty with little detail.

Lessons to learn here are, make sure that if you do end up making copies of old photos, make sure you still keep the original, no matter what state it is in! If you have to make a copy try to get it done professionally to ensure the maximum tonal range available, to allow for the best detail and best future photo restoration.

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