Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘photograph 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.

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.

Hi all

 I will be attending the Woking Family History Fair on the 31st October 2009. It will be held in Woking leisure centre from 10am to 4pm. If you wish to come along I will be just inside the door, look out for the banner. There will be loads of stall holders selling their services, postcards and books, so please arrive early.

 Hopefully I will see some of you there.

Neil

Restoring photos of your pets is just as important as restoring photos of your family. Well they are family aren’t they. Here I am showing the progress through restoring photo a dog.

The photo is heavily damaged but with some careful thought it can be restored.

The dogs toe pad has been replaced with the large black foot pad but scaled down and rotated and squashed. Above that some shadow has been cloned into the white space as in picture 1

You can see the muzzle has been cleaned up a bit here, using the patch tool and clone tools.

I have also copied the yellow dog toy from the left and pasted it to the right. I pasted again and flipped the yellow ball and with the patch and clone rebuilt the right hand side of the toy. I made sure there was some flash shadow around the ball in a slightly red tinted shadow to match the other side.

Finished cleaning up the muzzle and shadow underneath with clone tools and patch.

Here I have used the left side of the leg and clone upward towards the ball. I flipped this leg edge and used it for the right side.

Fortunately the customer had another photo of the dog lying down and I able to distort and warp the rear leg to replace much of the missing leg.

From the second photo I was able to use some belly fur and shade it with the dodge and burn tools. I added some flash shadows behind the newly added leg parts.

I reduced the red tint to the back and grey sofa and zoomed out for the finished product.

Hopefully you will look after your photos and not need to get your pet photos restored.

Low resolution digital photos can be restored but only as far as the pixels allow. Each image is made up from a collection of tiny pixels, all the colours and shades of the image made from small squares. If large areas of the image are blurred due to a dirty lens, or blurred due to movement of camera or subject, there has to be enough pixel information to correct the problem.

For an example I have included a 100 x 100 pixel image, (enlarged for this article) this is 10,000 pixels in all.

This image seems clear enough and you can make out the pixels very clearly.

Add some grease to the lens and now there is not much detail left . (simulated mobile phone image with and dirty lens)

It would be possible to copy and flip the helmet badge but there is no way an image this blurred can be sharpened or brought back into focus.

Mobile phone lenses are tiny, so any dust or grease that gets on the lens, would cover a larger part of that lens than if it were on a conventional camera, as a result it can blur a large part of the captured photo. Although this image is just 10,000 pixels it could easily be an enlarged head and shoulders section from a mobile phone group shot. No doubt that dust will be obscuring the one person in the photo you wanted to be perfect.

The lesson here is if you are taking mobile phone photos of an event that you must have a record of and you dont have a conventional camera, make sure your mobile phone lens is clean, very clean! If your images get blurred as a result of grease or dust like the above photo, there is very little that can be done.