Photo Restoration Blog

Posts Tagged ‘restoration’

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.

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.

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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