Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘photo repair’ Category

There are many way to change a photo’s tint using photoshop. I have made this short tutorial to show you how to change a photo from black and white to sepia using three different methods, each with similar results but with subtle differences.

We can use this image as a test image.

Method 1. Change your photo to RGB mode . Select from the top menus – image/adjustments/photo-filter.

You will get a colour box pop up. Choose a sepia colour.

Choose a fairly dark one

and then use the slider to increase the density.

Final result.

Method 2 This method using ”colour balance”. From the menus select image/adjustments/colour balance

Change the sliders with the radio button “shadows” selected so that you dial in around 20 red and 20 yellow.

Then do the same with the “midtones” but around 15 red and 15 yellow. You can tweak these setting to your own preferences.

Here is the final result. This method does not alter the whites in the highlights.

Method 3 Using a colour fill layer. Select from the menus, layer/new fill layer/solid colour

Then select “colour” in the blending mode box.

Select a nice sepia colour

and you are done!

I hope this helps everyone and just choose a method which suits you best, if it were my choice I would go with method 2

Repair my photo from Image-Restore.co.uk

I have here an example of a photo restoration, (removing a person) that if not correctly restored a simple brightness adjustment would reveal some very shoddy work indeed, I will explain.

Removing people from a photo

Lets have a look at this photo of some handsome college chaps on a night out with their partners. A request was made to remove the girls from the background which could be easy if it weren’t for the a hand on a shoulder and filling of the huge gap left behind.

There are two ways to go about this, the quick way and the right way. The quick way would be to select the girls with the selection tools and careful selection. Then simply clone over the girls with a large soft clone brush and rebuilding the pink shirt where the hand was.

Here is the image lightened a great deal to show the background detail.

Cloning in this manner creates repeat patterns where the clone brush has just laid down the same texture and detail each time creating an unconvincing background.

The incorrect way to clone

The right way would be to select and clone over but then make sure the background details were consistent with the image by following on the trees and the rocks behind the boys. I would not be able to sleep knowing that an image had been butchered in this manner.

Here is the image with corrected background detail and the top section of shadows lightened.

The correct way to clone

Now you know when your restoration is received and it looks like that “the people have been removed”. Think a bit more about what has gone on to achieve what you asked. I am sure that you will now begin to appreciate just how much is involved when a request is made to “remove those people”.

Image-Restore brings you a photo restoration service throughout the uk

I have just made some scans of random images from the old album to illustrate some of the points made in my previous post.

Family portrait in doorway

“Family in the doorway”, is an example of where the scanning light reflects on the silver within the print and glares back as a bluish tint, upper left. (The silver was used in the chemicals to develop the photos). Isolation of the blue within editing software can go some way to removing the cast and once the foreground is balanced with the background then this could make a nice family photo once again.

Old photo of a soldier

In the previous post I talked about sepia images, this example, “Soldier boy” as I have called him is a sepia toned postcard style image around 3×2 inches. His gun is as tall as him with the bayonet in place. It may be that this sepia tone has come from aging many years in a frame by a window, the sun’s rays causing damage over time. It may be that it was tinted sepia or it could be that heavy tobacco smoke helped with discolouration. I would approach this image by improving its contrast and tone, removing dust and dirt and trimming its edges. A nice touch would be to isolate the text and re-assemble the whole thing into a “new” postcard.

Mess Staff 1939 Portsmouth

The image I really marvel at is this one titled “Sergeants Mess staff Plymouth 1938”. It measures around 5 x 2.5 inches This is an excellent example of the clarity of the old format negatives. These postcards were sometimes printed directly from the negative by contact printing. Simply laying the negative on the photographic paper and exposing to light. This meant that the resulting image was an exact copy of the negative and the details from this type of print was astonishing. Depending in the camera the film may have been projected onto the paper but the enlargements were fairly small as materials were still relatively expensive but as in the case of this image the detail is still excellent.

Mess Staff 1939 Portsmouth

I have taken a small portion from the larger scan to show just how detailed they can be. You can see how bad this chaps teeth were, which is a testament to the quality and methods used by some of the photographers back in the 1930s.

Photos such as this can produce huge enlargements and a satisfying restoration normally results. These are my favourite kind of restorations and the more I look into them the more details I see. I restored a old naval photo of the 80 odd strong crew on board the ship Nasturtium and it wasn’t until the image was scanned in and cleaned up did I notice the ships mascot, a dog in the arm of one of the crew.

Thanks for reading.

Carrying out photo repairs throughout the UK