Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘photographic restoration techniques’ Category

Photo restoration or old enhancing methods

Back in the days of early photography when shutter speeds were slow and lens quality was being improved all the time, photographers strove to get the best results possible, even if it meant applying a few photo enhancing tricks of their own.

Lenses in the infancy of photography weren’t as optically perfect as they are today and the scene needed plenty of light and a long exposure time. The sensitivity of the “negative” was also a contributing factor. The less sensitive the light capturing medium the more light or exposure was needed. This type of camera would have been the very early Daguerreotypes around 1830 to 1860

As a result of these long shutter speeds subjects had to sit for several minutes. They often took a posture and facial expression which was comfortable. Smiling was not an optional as it couldn’t be held forgot long enough and lead to blurred features in the resulting photographs. This is why in most early photos people are not smiling and looking fairly sombre.

Old photo restoration techniques in the 1800's when photographic equipment needed a helping hand.

In this image you can clearly see brush strokes enhancing furniture and clothing.

To correct the shortcomings of the early photographic process, photographers deployed a variety of techniques to enhance their photos. Ill defined areas of detail especially in the shadows were enhanced with brush strokes of black ink, often painting in shadow lines around clothes or furniture. Eyes could be redrawn or lined in with pencil or even whitened with pigments similar to watercolours. Hair styles could also traced out with a careful brush stroke. I’ve seen images with a great deal of this enhancing and when restoring them there is no option but to leave it in. It not only adds to authenticity but if as it hides the true outlines, removing it would be detrimental to the image.

5 popular and useful posts.

My photo restoration blog is growing all the time and sometimes too much to read all at once, for convenience I have collated 5 popular and useful posts.

1: In digital photo restoration there are many tools an artist can use to help with their craft. Restoring a digital photo is sometimes very challenging but restoring an original is something else altogether, read here Can you restore an original?

2: One of the most exciting aspects of photo restoration is surprise. You are never sure what you are going to restore next and this photo of a  1900,s Unicycle record is one which ill never forget and had a great story to go with it too!

3: Sometimes images come nearly as long as i am tall! These are normally panorama images, for some examples check out the post Can panorama images be restored?

4: Everyone likes to wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed but what if your eye photos did not turn out as you wanted them, you could try the retouching eyes post.

5: If all of this sounds like something you could do, you could find out how to get started in photo restoration by reading how to start in photo restoration

A customer of mine recently sent me this photo.

correct a heavy colour fade

As you can see it is faded heavily in the middle due to sun exposure

Its always sad to see your photos face in this way but all is not lost.

The first task was to see if I could recover any colour at the scanning stage. This saves time if you can scan one image correctly for the outer section and one for the inner and combine the two. This did not work that well as the density of the tones were too light to get close to the correct colours. Abandoning that approach i tried adjustments layers, but they reveal no colour left that can be restored in the center section. The carpet and surrounding background have enough clues to give the colours to paint back into the photo but still  the densities need to be changed.

I selected the faded area with the selection tools and adjust the curves so that it resembled the tone of the outer section. To check this was spot on I painted a little of the cushion covers colour, on a separate layer, over the lighter area and adjusting the curves and matched it as close as possible with the darker, outer section.

With the burn tool for shadows and then mid tones, i set about burning the bits of background that didn’t quite match perfectly with the surrounding tones. From here on in I used lengthy techniques described in the previous 2 posts for colourising or adding colour to old photos. The final result is below.

Correct heavily faded colour

This took a fair while to complete but the result is more than worth it.!

If you wanted to read how to colour old photos and the associated techniques you can in Part 1 and Part 2 of colouring old photos.#

Colouring old photos can be done for as little as £25. The more complex they are the more it would cost. A typical examples is one or two people on a relatively simple background for £25.