Photo Restoration

The other night while tidying up I came across a box containing a few old photos.

Some of my parents and grandparents, and a few old postcards.

My plan is to scan these into the computer and “restore” them, and then play with them a little to see if I can enhance them a little. I’m considering downloading something like an adobe color wheel to give me more scope when it comes to trying to get the colors right on the image.

I’m hoping to raid my grandmother’s house in a couple of days to get some more photos, as the ones I found are either pretty boring or don’t really need any editing!

I’m sure I will be able to find some photographs somewhere. She was always telling me about how many photos she had, so I am holding her to her word. How great would it be to be able to restore these photographs though? The technology that can be used when it comes to photo editing today is second to none. Not only can you restore them, but you can blur photos, crop photos and you can even convert images to grayscale. See, I told you it was good.

I would love to be able to show my grandmother and my other family members how good their original photographs would look edited. I take great pride in that.

This is the first one I’ve had a play with. I believe that it was a cup won by the Durham Light Infantry in the late 1940s (or early 1950’s), I think it’s from a football tournament, but I can’t be sure.
My grandfather was in the DLI, and I believe he was present when this photo was taken, however, I can’t be sure, and unfortunately, he isn’t around to ask about it anymore.

Anyway, here is the pretty battered photo:

Cup won by the DLI in the 1940's

I’m editing this image in photoshop CS4, and scanned it in using a canon CanoScan lide100, which is a pretty low res scanner, but it’s all I can lay my hands on right now, so I guess it will have to do. Well, obviously if I am not satisfied with the result I get, I might get it scanned again from a firm that scan documents and photos and would do the editing again. Quality matters, after all!

That being said, this image was scanned in directly using photoshop, then cropped down to size from the A4 scan.

After this the image colour was corrected, first of all, I used the black and white function within photoshop, which gives great control over the individual colours within the image, I managed to get quite a good contrast balance by using the red green and yellow channels.
I then used the curves function to adjust the contrast, adding a medium contrast curve and modifying it slightly.

Once I was happy with the colour in the image I decided it was time to “restore” the photo.

I used mainly the clone tool, taking parts of the image and cloning them to other parts, this technique was quite difficult to get right in previous versions of photoshop, but in CS4 they added the preview function which makes it a whole lot easier!

for the tear down the left-hand side of the cup, I couldn’t use the clone tool, so for this, I had to copy the undamaged part of the cup on the right-hand side, then put it in a separate layer, resize and flip the layer and place it in the correct place, then blend the two layers together to get a seamless finish.

the same method was used to fix the base plate, although this was slightly trickier, as the perspective is different, I could have played with this and got it pixel perfect using either the warp, distort or perspective tools. but for the edit I’ve done tonight I decided just to leave it, as it looks alright as it is.

I then cut out the cup and placed it on its own layer, I was pretty lazy here, as it’s late I couldn’t bring myself to make a perfect cut out, so I skimped a little, but as the background is quite dark anyway, you cant really tell.

Once this was cut out, I played with the contrast a little more to make the cup a little more “punchy”

heres the rough edit of the image restored to black and white:

black and white version

After I got to this stage, I decided that I hadn’t finished yet, and i wanted to see if I could make it look even better.

So i colourised it, as photoshop calls it.

at present, in the image above, there are two main layers, the background and the cup itself, these were built from a few layers, but as it stands above they can be flattened down to just two.

from these two the background was colourised, and green colour is chosen, I then played with the saturation and hue sliders to make the green colour I liked best.
With this done, it still looked a little “flat”, so what I did next created a series of clipping masks above the layer, each with a black and white gradient applied, the gradient has a few colour points on it, not a straight black to white fade, this layers blending mode was then set to multiply, and its opacity was lowered to around 30%, there were three of these masks added in total, each with different gradients and different opacity levels,
these masks altered the overall balance of the leaves, and give a better impression of shadows and general colour variance within the bush. I could probably have spent lots more time on this and added a few more layers with different colours like browns and such into more realism, but really I’m just playing now. Well, I kind of was to start with anyway.

the layer with the cup was then given its own mask, a sort of pink colour was overlayed, and the opacity dropped right down to about 7%, this just gives a very slight tint of colour to the cup, as even silver colours have more colour depth in them than just blacks and whites.

the finished image is below:

coloured image

This was more of an exersise to cure bordem, than anything else, Its a rush job, and I’m not saying that to cover up my mistakes, I know the image is far from perfect, and I do intend to go back to it and do a better job buying generic valtrex online. regardless of this, I’m still pretty chuffed with how its turned out,

Comments and (constructive) criticisms are always welcome,

thanks for reading.

Chris