So much can be achieved with photo restoration, just browse through the blog and the website to get a broad spectrum of what is possible. Check through the lists below there may be a link with another article or web page you haven’t seen yet.
- Repairing and restoring cracks
- Repairing and restoring folds and creases
- Replacing missing pieces
- Restoring flaked emulsion
- Stitching pieces back together
- Correcting water damage
- Removing mould
- Removing paper texture
Retouching faces or bodies
- Retouching and colouring eyes
- Removing or adding hair
- Removing blemishes and wrinkles
- Smoothing skin tone
- Slimming the figure, removing the shine from faces
- Adding (digitally hand colouring) colour to a black and whit e photo
- Enhancing colours in a faded photo
- Removing colour casts and correcting colour
- Correcting film fogging
- Repairing stains
Combining and montage
- Adding people or objects to photos
- Removing people or objects from photos
- Using two or more photos to make one photo
- Using objects, people or anything to make something artistic.
Other possibilities
Restoration requests have been many and one the most in-depth and challenging was one presented to me by a young lady who had not seen her wedding photos for a long while, nor really in any great depth. Due to some family distress, they would have brought back bad memories and now ready, she examined them only to be disappointed. In this project I moved the tide further down the beach, removed creases from the wedding dress, removed bits of flab sticking out in various places, shiny faces were reduced. I rebuilt the foreground of a restaurant scene to remove a person, in all retouched and manipulated over 250 photos!
So what is not possible?
It is not possible to:
Focus a completely out of focus picture. (If it is an obviously out of focus photo it cannot be refocused)
Fixed a blurred photo.
This would be where the camera moved when taking the photo or the subject moved. Moving the camera when depressing the shutter is more evident from the early days of photography when the film speed and resulting shutter speeds were slower. The moment evident in the photo is sort of a moving blur, normally in a down and up motion. Motion in single plain can sometimes be corrected, but it is so rare. Examples you may have seen on the Internet are normally manufactured instances under ideal conditions, where the motion blur has a chance of being corrected.
Open closed eyes. Not without another set of open ones to replace them with.
Replace a head. Now we are getting silly, again not without another photo of that person’s head