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Photo repair and that horrible, brown crispy Sellotape.

Blog: Photo Repair and restoration
Posted by: 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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