Photo Restoration Blog

Posts Tagged ‘restoration’

Dear All

We have now received 400 photo restoration reviews!

There comes a time in everyone’s life where a milestone is reached. Well i wanted share this one with you all. Today we received our 400th positive review on the Freeindex.co.uk. The Free index is a Free Business Directory that want nothing else than to help small businesses get known by helping customers write, true and heart felt reviews. Without you my customers and the Freeindex as a team I would not have so many great reviews. See all our reviews here image-restore photo restoration reviews

Thank you all!

Neil

My previous post was a quick image of a Paterson contact printer made of Bakelite used for printing large negatives, which leads me nicely to this post. I restored two very large negatives recently. They were a non standard size of 6.5 inches by 4.5 inches image below

Heat damaged large format negatives

When i held them up to the light the subject matter seemed to show buildings, hidden underneath all the damage.

Light through the heat damaged, large format negative reveals the image

Once scanned with a large format negative attachment on my scanner, i put it through a few processes to eliminate the colour casts and reduce the damage as much as possible, which revealed the image.

Large format negative with lots of heat damage scanned and made into a positive

The followed a few hours of very patient wrinkle removal using a combination of tools, patch, heal, clone and spot heal with content aware selected. The sky was filtered to leave the original toning and grain match was applied.

Large format negative with heat damage restored into a new positive

The other one turned out great too!

Second large format negative restored

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.