Photo Restoration

 

On the left you see the original, badly creased. The main crease across the top of the picture had caused some of the emulsion to flake away. The had to be filled by hand. It was not possible to remove the appearance of the crease altogether however where it went across the sky I rendered it into clouds. The damage on the lower half of the picture was easier to repair as there is plenty of patterning to match it to.

The original picture was rather flat so I changed the gamma of the image. A little cropping and the finished picture is on the right.

 

This job was to get a photo suitable for display in a picture frame, from a passport photo. On the left the passport photo scanned on a flatbed scanner. Not a promising start and not the start I used.

Instead I re-photographed it in a light tent, which greatly reduced the embossing. From then it was as task of hand painting the embossed and staple holes using Photoshop Even though re-photographed had reduced the light and shade of the embossing it couldn't remove the distortion. This is where an artists judgement comes in. The finished picture on the right. The tonality was chosen by the client from a selection.

 

 

The Image was badly stained yellowish and brown as well as crumpled torn and gouged. Left, top is the image after scanning in colour and then filtering to remove the stains. I then repaired the scratches an abrasion to the picture, removed the line which looks like a hair but was some kind of marker. There was also some kind of indentation which seems to have been drawn across the picture from bottom centre to top left. This was particularly difficult to correct as it has displaced the emulsion in that direction.

After the picture repair I generated a matching oval mount and overlaid it to cover the badly damaged mount.

 

The Restoration of photographs is more of an art than a science, not that science or technology are not used, they are in large measure. It's the application that is the art and the difference between an image which has had some blemishes removed and also some of the detail too and an image which looks nearly as good as the day it was taken.

Many of the photo processing packages have a scratch remover but they also reduce the definition too. That's where the careful hand and eye of the restorer come in. Maybe hundreds of decisions are made in the restoration of a single image.