Photo Restoration Blog

Photos that I restore the most are be those that have faded. Simple fades are simple to correct. Just a quick adjustment of the levels or a quick burn in with dodge and burn tools. Complex fades like the one below are not so simple.

This image could not be colour corrected by tweaking the colours, in stead it had to be converted to black and white, restored and then coloured. You may have seen similar posts by me before on this but each one presents different challenges.

Bleached photo restore and colour

In this case the fades were corrected by multiple layers using “apply image”. Each layer was dropped on the next and masked in tighter to build back the tones. I had to stop when things started to look too gray. It then became evident the image need more contrast but this introduced more bleaching, so more masking. Once the exposure was looking ok, it was treated as any other restoration and the coloured using my colouring technique.

If you are not after photo restoration perhaps its photo retouching instead? The skills of a Photoshop artist should not just be limited to restoration of old photos, but everything. This helps the digital artist perfect their skills using many different techniques, many of which can be used across a wide range of imaging tasks. Some photo restoration techniques can be used in photo retouching and vice versa.

Below is an example of retouching and balancing out the proportions of a models face. Retouched using Photoshop, not a plug-in designed to do the job for you. These result in a clinical less natural retouch, without the fine control you get when you do it the right way.

Photo restoration skills can be applied to photo retouching too

Full face detail of photo retouching

A list of retouching that was performed:-

• Blemishes removed
• Any wrinkles (hardly any)
• Toned down any blueness where veins show through
• Hair – Hairline darkened to left to balance the face, Patch of hair added to forehead, Few stray hairs removed
• Fix odd shadows and distractions
• Face shaping, nose and jaw
• Skin Smoothing (without losing any detail)
• Eyes – Added eyelashes, removed contact lens edges, sharpening of eyes, catch lights added for extra punch
• Lips – Smoothed lips, lip colour and high lights, smile evened out
• Check adjust colour tone
• Sharpen

Skin close up

Face retouching uses the clone tool, healing brush tool (quite a lot), clone to darken and clone to lighten, blending modes, and shadow correcting much like restoring an old photo. Sure you’ll use one more than others but trying your hand at other types of Photoshop wizardry will help you as a well rounded artist.

I was browsing the web and came across a post about a digital film cartridge insert that you put inside you Film SLR to convert it to a digital camera. Sounds neat doesn’t it? Well who ever came up with the most recent manifestation of this idea did it for a Aprils fool prank. It came from the website re25.net (at the time this article was written the site was still live) and the idea is by no means new! Below is the 2012 idea.

Digital film concept to convert you SLR to a digital camera

Way back in 1998 the concept was on the cards too under the name of ImageK EFS-1. The image below shows an up to date possible working concept from pc.watch.impress.co.jp website. Stating the photo has taken at Photokina in Germany 1998 the worlds largest camera show.

1998 concept design for digital film ImageK EFS-1

The Sensor was to be around 1.3 MegaPixels and have around 40 to 64 MB of storage. Of course back then the idea was brilliant, an answer to everything, a universal drop-in gadget, the answer to converting to digital on the cheap. To date there is no evidence of any such such product on the market.

Serious buffs of digital camera technology may know of even earlier versions of this idea, do get in touch and let us know? We can add them into this post!