Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘old images that need restoring’ Category

Boosting the black and adding punch

Ok so have the images restored and they look great but they are a little flat in tone.

A great trick for enhancing the blacks and making a great contrast to the highlights to finish if the photo repair is to add a separate adjustment layer for colour balance. Convert your image to RGB

In this layer adjust the shadows so that they appear tinted slightly with blue. So add around 10-15 blue and 10-15 cyan on the sliders.

Now switch over to the highlights and warm them up, so use the sliders to add around 10-15 red and 10-30 yellow.

Now take a look at the before and after. It jumps out at you now doesn’t it! You can of course tone down this effect by adjusting the opacity of the layer in your layers palette.

Subtlety is the key as always when you want to achieve a convincing photo repair.

Neil

Providing photo restoration service uk

Photo Restoration – Tackling Underwater Images

You arrived back from the scuba diving holiday of a lifetime and … oh your photos are not what you thought, blue wishy-washy, lacking in punch and clarity. Sadly this is a property of water, it has the unfortunate ability to filter out the red spectrum of light and thus the further down you go the stronger the effect until eventually there is no red left in the available light. Your pictures will no doubt be a beautiful blue by now.

Correcting this effect is not as simple as it sounds. There is great deal of tweaking to be done. As your reds have completed disappeared it will be a good idea to check the channels of your image. Take a look at the red, it’s all but disappeared, it will probably be almost completely black and devoid of detail. Here it gets tricky, or at least finding the right combination of actions to take, requires some experience.

Basically the red channel is useless and needs to be recreated from scratch. We can borrow information from the green and blue channels to build one. Once this is done the reconstruction can begin. Sadly at this stage I cannot give a clear and concise procedural walk through, as each image has to be treated differently. I did try and produce an action for this but alas whilst working well for some images it ruined others and have therefore concluded it way more involved than my simplistic explanation.

I have seen this technique put to very good use and I will be back with the ins and outs once my schedule allows me to bring to you the mysteries of photo restoration and the science that fixes those underwater blues.

Image-restore.co.uk Providing a quality photo restoration service

A useful tool in any photo restoration is the vanishing point tool. Good for any perspective based restoration. Examples where to use this tool are for use with buildings or car parks, roads, paving, or windows, etc. In Photoshop CS2 / CS3 it is found under Filter/vanishing point form the top menu.

Basically it is a tool that allows you to draw a grid over your image and follow the lines of anything in perspective. In a recent image I removed some people from a car park with a large wooden clad building in the background.

The tool allows you to follow the vanishing perspective line along and clone along those lines. In the case of a wooden clad building the planks of wood along the buildings side get smaller as they go into the distance. People stand in the car park along side the building and are in the way.

Removing people from images using vanishing point and clone

Removing people from images using vanishing point and clone

With the vanishing point tool you can remove these people fairly simply by drawing the grid making sure it covers the people and a large enough area to sample the clone tool from. Keep the grid following the lines of perspective and if the grid turns blue you know you have done it right. To ensure the grid turns blue make sure your verticals are parallel to each other. Now when you clone over anything within the grid it can be cloned in perspective. Thus the planks down the side if the building are restored naturally over the people.

To tidy up the car park and to make sure the parking bays continue naturally through the image I added another plane to the perspective grid. You can drag out the handles from the grid to create another grid more or less at right angles (well in perspective terms anyway) and repeat the process in the car park.

Obviously there is more to it when it comes to cloning but by now your method of selection and cloning abilities should be up to scratch. Rebuilding the shrubs without repetitive patterns in them and any other flora and fauna to fill in the gaps.

Your done, congratulate yourself!

Hope this tip helps.

Neil

Providing a quality photo repair and restoration service uk