A customer came to me with a 3½ inch, 48 year old snapshot.
He wanted a 5x7 print for a gift. A 5x7 of the scanned image looked terrible but with the help of some Photoshop plugins and some retouching the nice image below was delivered. Note that the shadow from the camera flash was eliminated.
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Plugins used:
I discussed tintypes below and this is another example from my own collection. This is a tintype of my great grandmother as a child. The tintype was scanned and then the contrast and brightness were adjusted to obtain a good image. As you can see there were major condition issues - large portions of the image were missing and there were many marks and scratches. Below you will see the finished restoration after about two hours of work. Two hours well spent to capture this bit of my family history.
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There are times when an old photo has simply too many condition problems or simply was not that good to begin with to do a standard restoration. That doesn't mean you can't create something you could display. The picture on the left is of great historical significance to my family. It is a picture of the original family home in Idaho taken about 1907. The original is small and has some condition problems. The first thing I did was to separate the structure from the rest of the picture. I added a sky for some drama and used PhotoShop's dry brush filter on the foreground. The result below makes a nice 11 x 14 that I proudly display.
In addition to have pictures of family members this photo taken around 1905 is also a fine work of art. It reminds me of a Maxfield Parish painting. The original had too many condition issues to make a "straight" restoration possible. I first did as much retouching as I could. Next I used the Photo Shop dry brush filter to smooth the image. I then had added a vignette. The result below also made a wonderful 11 x 14 image that could be displayed with pride.
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This is another example of digital restoration from the same collection as the one below. The first problem here was the sky. I made the decision to simply scrap the existing sky and create a new one from scratch. I added some grain to the new sky so that it would match the original. The rest of the photo had many condition issues most of which could be fixed with the healing brush in photo shop. Some of the large areas in the rocks required some copy and paste using the method described below. It should be noted that I first remove the color before restoration - it is easier to retouch in gray scale. In most cases I will try to match the original color but in this case I chose not to.
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On the left is a wonderful old photo that is about 100 years old. As you can see it has some serious condition problems including large areas of missing emulsion. The most difficult area to restore was the skirt. I used Photo Shop for the project and several tools were used. First areas of the skirt that were intact were copied and then pasted into the missing areas. The dodge and burn tools were then used to match the pasted portions to the surrounding area. The healing brush was used fix the smaller areas. Finally some touch up had to be drawn with the paintbrush tool.
The healing brush was used for the sky, rocks, sand and water. The final restoration can be seen below.
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You may come across a thin 2¼ by 3½ inch metal with an image barely visible. This is a tintype. This was a widely used photo process used in the mid to late 19th century. In many cases this may be the only picture of an individual.
These images can be scanned and restored giving us a window into the past. After scanning the contrast of the image is adjusted using a photo editing program like Photo Shop to bring out the image. The tintype plates are more often than not scratched and damaged. The photo editing software can then be used to retouch and restore the image.
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