Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘old images that need restoring’ Category

I can now show you some old photo examples in from this wonderful old album, there are some treasures in here and most in need of some photographic repair. It contains postcard style prints from photographic studios in the 1920’s, smaller more modern prints on thinner, fragile paper. Some are sepia toned and others just plain black and white.

Old album page with black and white photos

Old album page with black and white photos

The chemicals used to develop the black and white photo of this age and indeed those tinted sepia contained silver. This silver is still present in these photos and you can see it when you tilt the image against the light. Some angles show the blacks as being a bluish tint. In some cases of restoration scanning this type of photo causes dense blue casts and the silver reflects light from the scanner creating difficulties for the restoration. Where you need to see the detail most, in the dark and shaded areas, it is just a sea of blue reflections. Evidence to correct this is noticeable in old galleries today where each photo tilts forwards hanging in its frame improve the viewing angle and reduce the effect.

In the photographers studios in 1910 – 1920 they may have used powder flash guns or depending on the set up natural light. The cameras still used relatively long exposures times which caused the subject to be become blurred on film. It would only take a blink at the wrong time or a wriggle and a ghostly blur would occur. In some group portraits this is evident where eyes show much paler and greyer than everyone else’s, or where the focus appear to be very soft on just one persons face. Powder flash would go some way to eliminating this as would flash bulbs when they were introduced nearer 1925-1930.

When I examine these old photos sometimes this has to be explained, as these details cannot realistically put back in or be recovered when they were never there in the first place. The great thing about these early photos though, is that they were often taken on larger format film which holds a great deal of detail. If you own negatives then it is these that can yield a superb reproduction, as do the prints taken from this type of film.

In the next post I will be taking a look at close ups of these photos and finding out what restoration work is involved.

Image-Restore bringing photo repair to the uk and surrey

Coming up soon… In future blog posts I will be looking into this album.

I am going to see what restoration nightmares are in here. I will be talking about how it is not always good to have a silver lining or at least where certain photos are concerned and a look at photo studios of the past and problems the photographers faced.

When you get a photo as bad as this in need of photo repair, it is seriously tempting to let a quality photo restoration service do it for you. But if you were to tackle this one it might be easiest to airbrush a new back ground or cheat by tightly cropping the photo so there is less work to do. This of course isn’t what restoring is all about.

It is about quality time restoring photos so they look like new from the time and period they were taken.

Creased up old photo restored

Patience is the key, its take a long time to fix a photo like this. Start with patching and retouching away the cracks that are on their own, giving larger and larger areas to sample texture from when you patch some more.Think of the photo as a sliding block puzzle, you are simply moving areas from one place to another to replace a bit that is missing. Sounds easy does it not? Obviously there is a degree of care from where the replacement texture is taken from, so that the new section blends in well. It’s not much good patching a smooth section of sky with texture from somebody’s woolen sweater. Common sense and patience is the recipe for success here.

When it comes to rebuilding the facial areas or areas where you have to be creative with your patching, slow down. Take a look at what you have in front of you and with a bit of imagination and perhaps a rescale here and there, possibly a flip, feather and blend, you can fill in the gaps. For a quality photo repair you may have to re texture afterwards by first rubber stamping in the correct tone from a nearby source and then patching to regain a little texture.

In this case a nose tip had to be borrowed from another photo and blended in. The windows in the back ground had slight re structure and overall tone and definition was improved with dodge and burn in subtle amounts. A low opacity layer of sharpen was added to the finally repaired old photo. Now we have the quality photo restoration we were looking for. You may want to down sample from your high res scan and apply a slight sharpen again depending on the final reproduction size.

Neil Rhodes

Image-Restore.co.uk Providing quality photo restoration Surrey and Farnham area