Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘photo restoration’ Category

You have probably at some stage deleted some digital files from your camera memory card. Fear not they may be recoverable if you have not performed any further camera to card actions. The best thing about this is it will cost you nothing to recover them either!

PC Inspector.de is FreeWare. I personally have been using it to recover my deleted files for many years and thought I should share it with you. The software is called PCInspector but it also recovers or restores your photos from your memory card too. At the time I was using it allot, I was working at a digital camera company where this was a regular fix. The great thing is it restored photos just as many times, if not more than the leading, paid for software!

Don’t pay get it free!

NOTE: I do not offer technical support for this photo restoration software so please don’t email me about it. If the embedded link fails then visit pcinspector.de directly.

Don’t forget to wander round the rest of the blog for other photo repair and restoration tips.

Hello everyone, continuing with the basic skills photo restoration tutorials, I have another here which touches upon matching the grain within a photo when replacing a background. You can read more about this topic in the matching grain blog post.

Remember though only replace the background if you have to! The original one restored, will look far more convincing than one you made up yourself.

Hello everyone,

I will be making some short, basic skills, video tutorials of some of my photo restoration techniques. This should make it easier to see how these photo restoration techniques are done and easier to learn.

I am learning the new software and my microphone is arriving soon, stay tuned.

See you back here soon! Ok its here, sorry the sound is a bit quiet but hopefully I can resolve this on the next tutorial or revisit this one tomorrow..

If you want to read a written post on the importance of selection you can at this link. Photo restoration and the importance of selection.

Neil

Sometimes your camera may leak light onto the film other than through the shutter, perhaps it was faulty or cracked of broken. If it were black and white film it would be relatively easy to fix. If it were colour film this may be the result.

Fixing this much leak is not as simple as it sounds. There are many ways to go about this but as with any task in Photoshop it’s what works best for the given task ahead.  For this image some conventional restoration work or patching and cloning as well as using the colour channels, masks for adding back  colour and detail from the original were used.

We can look at the individual colour channels to see which one is a good starting point fot the restoration. What is most noticeable is the lack detail in this area, low in density and sharpness. This will be addressed later.

Here with the blue channel extracted and the original colour image thrown over the top, you can see how easy it would be to just clone all the colour back in setting the layer to “colour”. This is where the density of the underlying damage needs to be fixed. By selecting these and changing the levels and tones they can be evened out, although the banding, will have to be blended out later with some overlay dodge and burn layers.

Once the main areas have been balanced back to the tones  of the undamaged areas the colour can be added back with the original layer set to “colour”. Surrounding colours can be cloned back in, or sampled and painted back in with a brush set to colour mode.

Once this has been achieved, the soft details need to be address with conventional patching and pasting sections over. To give an even tone to rigid inflatable, I had to copy a section from the front and paste and warp and set layer to darken, to add some shading and detail back in. Once the skirt of the boat was fixed the colours then had to be adjusted with hue saturation and exposure to get the correct glow to match the suns reflection on the bow.
The same technique was used to add details back to the other blurred areas.

Those of you who know photoshop may be asking why there is no full, step by step of this restoration? The reason is that the original file was  10600 pixels wide! And once you get those layers going in Photoshop the file soon crept up to 1000Mb and beyond, so each stage was flattened to keep my processor from going up in smoke!
The final steps were to remove the banding from the dividing lines between all the varying layers of light leak. This was done with a combination of dodge and burn overlay, and cloning areas from other parts of the image to piece it back together.

Thanks to all who attended the Woking Family History Fair Today 31st October 2009, it was good day and everyone enjoyed it. I was located just inside the main door but outside the main hall.

There was a photo dating help centre in the main hall who helped boost the numbers of people coming across my stand to restore old photos, photo post cards, photo printing and photo wallets to keep your old photos safe , many stands for researching your family tree, and of course my photo restoration stand.

Many people attended and there was great atmosphere.

A small but well designed stand before the event started.

 A special thanks to the stand to my left who fetched me a cup of tea when things got busy and refreshments were needed.

Thanks again to all who attended!

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.