Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘photo restoration’ Category

Sometimes images are too big to scan in one piece especially the very long panorama photos that can reach well over 30 inches and bigger than 50 inches sometimes!

long panorama school photo

What can you do? You can scan this type of image in pieces and then use PhotoShop to stitch them back together.  I will use and example of a photo around 56 inches long of some windmills. It was scanned in five separate sections with an overlap or around 25% per photo and with all your scanners auto exposure setting turned off. This is to ensure that all the separate scans are exactly the same. If you leave your scanner to auto correct each one then they will all end up with slightly different tones and contrast which wont match well when photoshop comes to stitch them together. Once your image is scanned save the files off to a folder called panorama or something useful to you.

Below is the place to find the photo merge or stitch menu to start the photo stitching process once we have our scans saved.

Finding the "photomerge" option in photoshop for stitching large photos together

Next, browse to where we saved the images.

Pointing the photo merge where to open the separate scans ready for stitching

Select the “Auto” option from the radio buttons and select “blend images together” from the check box below the list of files you browsed for just now. Then select OK.

panorama layers once stitched

In the finished result above after PhotoShop has finished stitching the layers, each one will be on a separate layer allowing you to fine tune them in case the stitch was not 100% accurate.

You can see here that I have switched off one of the layers so you can see how photoshop has blended the image. Its done in a nice, seemingly random fashion which is the best blend route and so that it cannot be seen when you zoom in and inspect it. Which is of course the way we want it, totally invisible!

There are not many occasions when it gets it wrong. I have had 2 or 3 instances when stitching school photos with many people together that two or more heads get replicated. Its very rare but can be corrected by manually painting over the masks on the layers. To do this you click on the black mask of the layer that wasn’t blended properly and paint with black or white soft brush, to add or remove the offending or misaligned part of the image.

To see this image restored, see can panorama images be restored or to see another example of stitching images try the post on flaked emulsion on large images

Hello all

I have been working very hard on a new photo retouching site to show the commerical side of image-restore’s skill set. The new site is  The Photo Retoucher. The main site is up and running but I am adding more content as I go. My main focus is to keep strong pieces of work in the folio and appeal to commercial, magazines, fashion models and agencies. I hope you stop by and take a look. Some of you may have seen some of the peices from previous posts from plxeyes or other photo retouching posts.

Here is a snap shot of the site

Photo retouching and image retouching for commercial, magazines, fashion models and agencies

thanks for stopping by The Photo Retoucher.

The original cast of Jabas in 1987

Hello all, I have just had an email giving me the go ahead to post this image that was shown on Welsh TV.

The photo was taken back in 1987 and is of a group of actors who took part in a very popular long-running series called ‘Jabas’. The photo was used as part of the series ‘Lle Aeth Pawb?’ (‘Where Are They Now?’ ) for S4C- which brings back a group of people photographed together at one point of time in the past and reunites them in the very same place years later, telling the stories of  the individuals in the intervening years.

The only photo that the production company had was an old black and white but very good quality and needed it had colouring. With some reference material I was able to hand colour it in keeping with the original wardrobe. I added the colour stack so you can see how many layers were used. Some set to “colour” others set to “overlay” “vivid light” , “colour burn”, “softlight” and “multiply”

Hand coloured image of Jabas

It was screened on Tuesday 11 May, 20:25 welsh TV channel S4C

I would like to credit the production company (Cwmni Da), the original photographer (Gerallt Llewelyn) and the production ‘Lle Aeth Pawb?’ which featured the photo.

You can see the image here although I am not sure if the link will remain live for long!

Screen grab from the Welsh TV page S4C Image-Restores hand coloured image

Image-restore on TV who’d of thought!

I have just launched a new service, wedding retouching at weddingretouching.co.uk a retouching service for wedding photographers. At Wedding Retouching we can recompose your photo, remove unwanted shadows and confetti or even people. Combine two or more photos together to create that moment you missed, or create a sense of mood or tranquillity. We can remove creases from clothes and colour black and white photos and turn images into silhouettes and more.

Wedding retouching services at weddingretouching.co.uk

Still the same excellent photo retouching you get from image-restore.co.uk but now dedicated to wedding retouching.

Photo restoration of faces with a piece missing is always a tricky restoration to perform. If it is not known how the facial features appeared in the original and there is no reference then these features have to be retouched from pieces of the original photo. The face has to be visualized complete and then a bit a time, restored using tiny bit of tone and texture from the original photograph.

Photo restoration and rebuilding a face with a piece missing

In this close up crop of a photo, a grade 3 restoration, the nose and eyes are almost completely gone.  There is no reference photo for the missing eyes and nose. This restoration was performed by taking what little information there was and teasing it out to complete the picture. A patch of skin tone was first applied to the nose area and then shaded in to match. The tiny piece of eye was cut and enlarged and flipped and then using the eye lines and pupil the missing eye was slowly rebuilt. The nose was built from the existing nose texture and then shaded and blended the texture.

These is no magic wand for a photo restoration like this, it is time and care that makes a face with a missing piece become whole again. It can sometimes seem that the final outlay for such a small amount of damage does not equate  and that the effort that is put into restoring old photos is harder to appreciate.

“I was truly delighted with the photo restoration achieved by Image Restore. The 90 year old photo was badly damaged, particularly round the facial area. By the time Neil had worked his magic you wouldn’t have known it wasn’t in original condition. The work was turned round very quickly and communications were excellent throughout. Highly recommended.” L Davis 1st May 2010

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.