Innholdsfortegnelse for Photo Restoration i Photo Restoration

We all know photo albums are the first things people pack when they’re forced to leave home due to catastrophes like fire and flooding. Most people rate photos among their most valuable possessions because they contain precious memories. The best way to make sure these memories are protected and kept safe throughout the years is to digitise them. Digitised photos will no longer fade; they’ll also be easier to organise, share and keep safe if something untoward happens to the originals. It’s easy to save image files to a computer, tablet, phone or online cloud server and also to keep copies on several different storage devices as backups. It’s also simple to label the image files so they’re easy to locate when you want to share them via email and…

Once you’ve restored your old photos what do you plan to do with them? First it’s essential to store them safely – a process that should have commenced straight after they were digitised. Initially, images will be stored on your computer’s hard drive, preferably in an easily-identifiable folder that you can return to when you need to copy, resize or re-format the images. Unfortunately, hard drives aren’t necessarily the safest place to keep images; most people will have experienced at least one hard disk crash since they began working with computers. And the chances of disk failure increase as they become older. This brings us to the question of backing-up – an absolute ‘must’ if the images are to be preserved. Most serious photographers – including all pro photographers –…

Most of us have old photos we value; either ones shot when we were young or collections inherited from relatives. The latter may contain universally valuable images, dating back to the early 20th Century when easy-to-operate cameras became affordable. The widespread introduction of 35mm colour slide film in the 1960s was followed by consumer-level colour negative film from the 1970s on, when minilabs made processing relatively cheap and easy to access. A search through old shoeboxes (the traditional storage places for old photos) and photo albums will probably reveal a diverse collection of prints, film types and formats, all of which will require different treatment. Smartphone scanning While you can copy prints by re-photographing them with a camera or smartphone, the results are variable. Smartphone scanning is fairly straightforward if…

Full restoration of damaged photos can be very time-consuming and involve a lot of detailed work. Fortunately, some fixes can be really simple and achievable with a couple of clicks and/or slider adjustments. But some images have damage that is harder to fix. There’s not much you can do to repair physical damage. Torn prints may be repairable with tape on the back of the print to hold the pieces together before they are scanned, but they will need plenty of localised ‘touch-ups’ to cover-up the damage. Negatives and prints that have been cut are almost impossible to repair but may be improved with extensive editing, if you feel it’s worth the effort. When working on scanned images, it’s normally easiest to start by duplicating the image to produce a…

The best way to learn about editing is by actually carrying out a couple of restorations. In this chapter we look at ‘fixes’ for some of the most common blemishes you’re likely to find when you scan old photographs. World War II photo We start with a family photograph dating back to late in World War II and work through it step-by-step, addressing different problems in the original. This example is typical of a minimally-damaged original in which the majority of blemishes are dark or light spots, but the original has a noticeable crease that needs to be addressed. The first – and easiest – problem to tackle is to remove the large area of blank, white sky above the main subject. Cropping it away is the simplest way to…

Most image editors will provide at least some of the tools you need for ‘restoring’ old photos to a condition that makes them usable for later projects. But basic applications, like the ones included in the Windows and MacOS operating systems provide a limited tool set that is seldom up to the task. Finding the right application Choosing which software to use will depend on the degree to which you want to pursue photo restoration, the number of photos you want to restore and the extent to which they are damaged. Photos that require only basic edits are easy to restore with very basic software. If you want to take restoration seriously and have a large number of photos to digitise and fix, you’ll be better off with a more…

Today’s editing/retouching tools are powerful, but there are some things you simply can’t fix. There may also be images that would take much longer than the time you can devote to fixing them and others where you simply lack the expertise necessary for the job. Photo restoration can be a complex task, so each image will normally need to be assessed individually. Some photos might have little to no apparent damage, aside from minor spots or abrasion marks, while others may appear very severely damaged and may seem unrepairable. If the subject’s face is intact and the background has some moderate damage, this will be an easier problem to fix. Some photos that are very severely damaged can be partially repaired, while others are essentially unrepairable. For example, it’s not…