Photo Restoration Blog

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

Regular visitors may be familiar with my entries into photoshop competitions. A short while ago I entered a photoshop competition to manipulate a photo of some tree bark on pxleyes website. I have just been back there to see how my entry was doing and I came second! I am most pleased. For those of you that are interested my photoshop portfolio is on the site and here is the picture that came second. A comment below my photo read “A wooden wood-worm in wood”

Which I though was very fitting. I hope you like it.

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!

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

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.

Some of you may have noticed a slow down in blog posts recently. I have been concentrating on quality not quantity of posts. Rather than churn out photo restoration articles with thin, pointless content, I am taking the slow approach to ensure that each one covers new aspects or expands on others. This way the value of the blog does not suffer. This approach is also a good one to take with photo restoration, take is slow and steady, rushing just blinds you with wanting to see that end result without concentrating on all the processes along the way.

Preparation – ensure both scanner and image are clean, decide the best resolution for the final reproduction, whether to scan with pre-set optimum settings or create a custom scan curve for any particular image.

Restoration – restore fades, correct colour balance, enhance tones, repair scratches and dust, cracks and rips and clean up the back ground. Sharpen using one of many methods and re-size file for different printing sizes.

Completion -  Choose print finish, whether to add a border, sepia tone or keep original colours or hand color the whole image.

There are many processes involved, its better to get them all right and then the quality of work remains constant.

So whilst there is a slow down in blog posts be assured those that will follow will be of the quality of those before.

Neil