Photo Repair and restoration

Photo repair and that horrible, brown crispy Sellotape.

Source: Photo Restoration Wizard
Monday 6th October 2008, 10:40am

Your old snaps may be in need of photo repair. Ask yourself these questions. Have they been stuck at the bottom of a drawer? Or in a self cling photo album? or worse still, stuck with glue or Sellotape(TM) onto the pages...

Note: The following information is meant to be genuinely useful and helpful for those with degrading photos.

If this is the case your photos may already be damaged, as the glues in these old photo albums age, they crystallize and discolour your photos, sticking to them causing bumps and ridges which in turn causes wear and tear on the surface emulsion.

Do not try to remove your photographs from the album as this could cause them to be un-repairable. You could tear, rip or bend them trying to un-stick them from the pages. If they are stained by the glue, particularly from the self cling kind of album they may also have a pattern on them. The adhesive from the clear page that lays over the top of the photos, to hold them in place sometimes appears in diagonal lines. A line of glue then a space and this repeats, it is this repeat pattern of glue that ends up stuck to your photographs, staining them and causing damage to the emulsion. It not something that can be easily removed and best not attempted at all. It is best to get a photo repair and have them restored professionally.

Another type of damage can be caused by Sellotape™. First invented in 1930 by Richard Drew it seemed like the perfect solution for sticking together a torn photo, it was clear and smooth and fast. Now look at your photos stuck up with tape, brown and crispy and stained. The chemistry in the tape changes over the years causing the tape to go brittle and brown and then the stains hide the underlying details and can ruin your photo. Often corners are stuck with tape to hold them in the album or worse still tape across the front of the photo. I am sure that it makes sense at the time to do this but it is best not to stick at all.

The best way to preserve your old photos is to use acid free mounts or better still acid free photo pockets or albums from specialist suppliers. If you cannot remove them from the albums and the pages are not stuck together, insert a piece of acid free tissue paper between each page and make sure that you keep your albums and photos out of direct sunlight. The harmful UV rays that harm our skin, fade your photos too.

If you do find yourself in the situation where by your photos are stuck in the album and looking worse for wear then you could try scanning them on a scanner to save them digitally but make sure you do it right.

Make sure you look at the settings within the scanning software to see how it is saving your image or check if it gives you any options to alter the way the file is saved or scanned. Saving without compression or little compression is the best way to preserve detail in your image. A JPEG file one of the most common file formats and is a “lossy” format, or a format where data is discarded in order to save space when saving. The higher the compression the more data is thrown away and the less detail there will be in your image.
There is no excuse these days, when hard disks are so very cheap to save your image with any other setting other than the best. It might be worth examining the software that came with your scanner or camera and check that you do have the option to change the way it saves and what format it saves your images in. Phrases to look for in the manual or software settings are “best setting” or the “lowest compression”, “lossless format” or “large file size”. You get the idea but do look for the top setting.

The more compression the worse the data becomes and more the image suffers. You will start to see blocks forming in your digital images where the JPEG algorithm splits up the photo into chunks in order to save it, the more data that is thrown away the more blocks there are visible. When this happens across a detailed section of the image the details are lost, blocks meet and slurring of colours and details occur. This is called JPEG artefacts. It is these artefacts we do not want when our software takes over and saves our images for us.
Once your image is saved properly, you can then set about emailing or uploading to a respectable photo restoration expert such as Image-Restore.

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Photo Restoration - The Importance of Selection

Source: Photo Restoration Wizard
Monday 3rd September 2007, 8:26pm

The selection should be based on the sharpness of the image. By this I mean how sharp or how much in focus the image is. For example if you blow up an image to 200-300% and see how far the pixels merge or overlap ...

Photo Restoration - The Importance of selection.

Due to a recent spate of thoughtlessness i managed to delete this post so i have now reposted it , slightly revised as its written from scratch

When carrying out photo restoration and restoring an old photograph quite often pieces of it need to be patched up and healed or cloned. To do this you may just grab the clone brush and clone over, but care and planning with sections can create a neater and more convincing job.

If you need to clone up to an object, its best to select the object first creating a barrier so that no cloning will go beyond that point. The selection should be based on the sharpness of the image. By this I mean how sharp or how much in focus the image is. For example if you blow up an image to 200-300% and see how far the pixels merge or overlap between to objects. It may be in a high resolution image this is only 1 pixel but in a lower resolution or scan of an old photograph with large grain, it may be 3 or 4. It is this “focus” that you image selection should be based on.

By using the focus you can feather your selection and clone up to that point with a realistic edge that suits the image you are working on. Used in conjunction with the “heal” tool this can be a very good method for avoiding the smudge effect you get when healing too close to sections with contrast. If you havent come across this before its very annoying and this simple technique avoids all the undo and re-cloning you may have repeated over and over not quite understanding why it does it.

I hope that this tip is useful for someone out there

Neil Rhodes

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Photo Restoration - Retouching Faces

Source: Photo Restoration Wizard
Monday 13th August 2007, 11:31am

Instant makeovers, years taken off, digital plastic surgery, its all possible but just how far do you go?

Facial restorations involving removing wrinkles, reducing pores, retouching eyes, removing blemishes etc. should be done with discretion. Its very tempting to attack the image with gusto sweeping away all evidence of anything natural and end up with a porcelain skin that looks a little too much like a wax work that a persons face.

Start by reducing the shadows, cleaning away any blemishes that would not be natural, perhaps reducing fine lines around the eyes but not completely removing them. Even out the skin tone next with an overlay filter on a separate layer. Perhaps you might use the patch tool if you have some good texture to sample, to smooth out the tones. Brighten up the eyes and remove the shine from the skin. Sometimes you may have to redraw the catch-lights in the eyes but make sure they look natural, not just blobs of white, shape them a little and add some transparency. Reduce pores by either another layer set Gaussian Blur or targeting the larger ones individually, if you have a large tablet you can actually work quite quickly reducing them with a dab of the pen set up correctly, this way no detail is lost on the face at all.

Restored face.

Above all else don’t over do it. In previous posts I have mentioned before, it must look like nothing has changed, nothing at all. If it looks like it has been restored, you haven’t done it well enough. This industry is plentiful with wannabe retouchers, but to stay up the top there must be no evidence of cloning or restoring anywhere. If you keep everything on separate layers you can always change the opacity to vary the intensity of each step to keep a natural look.

Good luck and take it slow and steady and keep it natural.

Neil

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Photo Restoration Water damaged or flood damaged photos.

Source: Photo Restoration Wizard
Sunday 29th July 2007, 10:28pm

Not as impossible as you may think...

Restoring any photo should be pleasure not a chore. If a water damaged photo should need restoring, perhaps one recovered from a flood or a rainy camping trip then provided it is dry it can be scanned and restored like any other damaged photo. Of course the extent of damage may mean you have to replace an entire background by using the method of selection I described in “the importance of selection”. Once you have cut out you subjects you can choose and replace the background. Should the subject not be a person but a landscape then it may be better to approach the restoration from another angle.

See if you can find out when the scene was, what country and what time of year, this may help with the types of trees, flowers and surroundings you may need to research before restoring the flood damage. You may even find a similar scene in a reference book or even live near by where you can glean clues as to what things may have looked like.

If it is an old photo with people in a scene and the water damage means some of the clothes or objects have been distorted or lost altogether within the image then you can again get researching. Perhaps the owner knows what the people were wearing or have another photo that is not damaged you can use for reference. Photos of the period will give you great references to fashion and clothing and what types of hardware was around at the time. You may need to replace a car, rake, wheel barrow or pram, get as inventive as you can.

You may well be up against some really challenging colour bleeds and awkward colour fades, but with the usual patch tool and some selective feathering around the bled colour on a separate layer you should be able to colour correct these fairly easily.

Remember with the power of Photoshop and your skill anything is possible, the pleasure will be in knowing that you can restore it no matter how bad it is and you tackled and conquered something you wouldn’t normally have taken a second look at.

Once again good luck and remember, flooded photos are not flushed away memories but restorable ones.

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Photo Restoration. An natural eye and restoring without adding perceived artistic merit

Source: Photo Restoration Wizard
Friday 13th July 2007, 8:51pm

Sorry about the lengthy title but I could find anything more catchy! Ok so you can use a computer and you can use Photoshop, and you can have a good go at restoring a photo, but does this mean you are a good photo restorer?

Not always.

There are a few fundamentals to photo restoration that must be addressed. Unless you can appreciate perspective, light and shade and or the natural environment and how light may affect one object differently under certain circumstances, then this could make or break a restoration.

Example: An old photo which is wrinkled, torn and damaged in the foreground, it’s a landscape with a building and some people in it, they stand in front of their house.

Photo with permission of owner and is subject to copywright.

When restoring land and rough ground, don’t simply grab the clone tool and heal tools and swipe eagerly over the foreground to repaint the grass or rubble or dirt. This can lead to repeated patterns and evidence of short cutting the restoration. Take your time to analyse the scene. If there are tracks on the road or rough ground made by vehicles or carts, look how the ground may have been disturbed and restore it disturbed. Don’t be tempted to clean up and area and make it all nice and uniform and be artistic, restore it, nature is not uniform especially landscapes.

Also examine where the light is coming from, lets say you’ve fixed you foreground and removed the tears and evened out the ground, but does it look restored, if it does it’s not right. You need to place rocks and grass realistically random, and in the case of the tracks make sure the ground follows a natural path of disturbance. The light of shadow can be added last to give the slow moving shadows and rolling tone of the ground, with the old friend dodge and burn. Make sure you use a large soft brush set to 5-12 percent to darken mid tones and think hard where the ground is lower or higher and apply subtle shadow where needed to bring life back to a flat landscape or foreground. Experiment with darkening the shadows too, but don’t over do it subtlety is the key here and realism is the most important.

Old farm house restored

If you don’t have the eye for this sort of thing then you may miss what’s wrong with your restoration and may never work out no mater how hard you look why it doesn’t look quite right.

One again I hope this helps some people slow down and observe, I know Photoshop is a quick fix sometime but it needs to be used slowly and thoughtfully.

Once again i hope this helps a few people slow down and think hard about the photo before restoring.

Neil

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