Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘photographic restoration techniques’ Category

When restoring a photo using Photoshop there are so many ways to repair damage that i thought i would take a typical example of a fold mark or crease and show the ways we can use to repair it.

One method we can use for fixing this damage would be to use the “patch tool”, normally good for correcting or replacing large areas of an image.

Using the Patch Tool

Using the patch tool in this way can sometimes result in smeared colour or tone contamination from nearby contrasting areas. To avoid this clone over any overly dark or light spots so when you outline the area to be patched, the outline runs through an area or similar tone. You can patch through nearly a entire image in this manner. The skill comes from knowing where to take the patch from as in a lot or circumstances there seems no obvious place to select a donor piece. Of course like any restoration there will be a fair bit of tiding up to do, such dodging and burning any areas that didn’t patch that well and possibly even using the clone tool to tidy up edges and add back some definition where the patches have left a soft edge.

Using the Clone Tool

Using the clone tool is probably the favorite amongst most of us who know something about Photoshop. It used to great effect and has many options besides the simple clone I have shown here. For example it can be used in conjunction with “darken” or “lighten” to give great effect when cloning up to contrasting edges or over dark or light patches.

Other methods you could use are the Spot Healing Brush Tool or he Healing Brush. These can used to great effect when replacing soft or blurred sections of an image with texture from other part of the image, say to add texture or grain back to blurred face or clothing. Here they work fairly well but not as good as the clone.

Using the Spot Healing Tool

Of these methods they all can be used together especially when patching up or rebuilding a far more complex image. An image such as a child posing in a Victorian photographers studio in a grand chair, with a leg missing and the wooden scrolls damaged on the engravings. This would need careful use of all the techniques above. With these more complex rebuilds, artistic abilities come into play. The ability to see light and dark for shape and form and subtle colours that push and pull detail into and out of the picture. Its these skills that can used to rebuild and restore the image to its former state.

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 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.