Photo Restoration Blog

Posts Tagged ‘photo’

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.

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.

Image Resolution and photo restoration. Part 1/2

Before we start restoring any photographs we really need to understand printing resolution so we know how big our final photo restoration can be printed

The amount of times I have received requests for information on the ins and outs of printing resolution. I have read many an articles and to be frank none of the put it very simply. Here is my version.

You own a printer and you own a digital camera or have some digital images you wish to print. Just how big can you print and it still look good? Well it amounts to several factors but the best one is whatever looks good to you. This sounds very amateurish and am sure some of you might wince at my short answer, but really if you are happy with the result then that’s an important factor. But if you are not happy then maybe you are viewing it too close, viewing distance is also another factor. Seriously do you look at an A3 picture from 10 inches away or do you stand back and admire the picture for what it is? You should view it from a distance that is right for the size of image. If you are too close then you may see the digital artefacts or pixels that the image is made up from, this is most likely to happen on larger photos than 10×8 inches or on posters.

Ink Jet printers often have an enormous printing resolution, for example 4800x 2400 dpi, dots per inch. You can immediately get confused if you try and equate this with the resolution of your image, for example your cameras resolution is 2816 x 2120 or 6 million pixels. If you print the image using the printers maximum resolution, then surely your image will appear less than an inch big? Yes, but this is not how you should interpret it, you cannot literally equate the two devices in this way, I will explain

Commercial printers who uses printing presses used to publish books or glossy magazines always request images at 300dpi as that is the industry standard. This is a good optimum printing resolution for us too, and this can be used as a base for our printing equation. Simply put, what ever your image is in size it can be printed at 300 dpi. Well actually its ppi or pixels per inch, as you camera or image is digital and in pixels, not dots like a printer. For example even a 640 x 480 resolution image can be 300 dpi but will only measure just over 2 x 1 inches achieved by simply dividing the dots per inch into the pixel size of the image. When we get larger images such as 2816 x 2120 we can see that at the optimum printing resolution of 300 dpi. We spread those pixels over 300 pixels per inch and get a image size on paper of 9.4 x 7 inches.

see more in part two…

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