Restoring old photos

Restoring old photos

One of the things I enjoy doing is restoring old photos. In many cases the photographer gave their life for their work. In the case of Tintype photos the use of boiling Mercury in a tent was used to give a image on a metal plate. This in the long run would kill the photographer while making his art.

The later photographers would make a negative that was the same size as the print. After developing the negative also in an enclosed place would place the negative over a piece of paper with Silver Oxide on it open a window and expose the paper, hence the process called burning an image. The black would stop the light from going through and make that part white and what was not covered by the dark part light. Then run the paper through a bath of chemicals to wash away the Oxide and leave the burned Oxide on the paper. Each photo was done by hand so the time taken for each photo made them expensive for the time.

With computers we have the ability to restore these treasures back to a form that we can see. I am going to attempt to give you some tips on how to do this so that you can restore them yourself. There are lots of graphic programs out there that you can use.

The first thing you have to do is scan in the photos as large as you can. Most scanners when you open them allow for Options. Look at the options and see if you can change the DPI (Dots Per Inch) Many scanners are set to a very low DPI, 75dpi or maybe 150 dpi. When you bought your scanner they advertise maybe 9600 dpi. The larger the DPI the larger the file, some computers will not handle 9600 dpi because of the size of the file. The bigger the file the easier it is to fix the little defects, scratches on and color deformed pictures. The size of the file will be dependent on the amount of Memory you have on your computer, this you will learn from trying different levels of DPI.

The Sepia tone is the natural aging of a black and white photo in the paper will turn brown with age. One of the things you wish to do is to get the photo back to a true Black and white. Most graphic programs will convert a color photo to Gray Scale. This will convert the photo back to a truer black and white.

By using the Adjustments/ brightness and contrast you can restore some of the true photo. There may be still some things that you do not want in the photo but do not worry that can be taken out a little later.

On each step of this you will need to save your work, if possible with different names like Oldphoto-1, -2, and so on. That way if you make changes that you do not like you do not have to back up and stare over again. I sometimes will have 6 or 10 back ups as I work on the pictures.

Once you have a image you can work with you are ready to do some editing of the photo.

Next look on your editor and see where you can change a black and white back to Color. In today’s market you can get a photo printed by many commercial photo shops faster and cheaper than you can on your own printer. BUT they are only set up to do Color pictures, if you take a photo in to them in a black and white format the pictures come out looking Milky and with out a true black and white. Also to put the Sepia back into the completed photo the picture has to be in a color format.

Most editors have a tool called a "cloning brush". The Cloning Brush will allow you to pick up colors from one place and put the same spot some where else. If you want to replace black with white you can pick a place that is white and place that pattern in the space you wish to replace. You can make a person have 2 heads if you want.

HINT; when working sometimes it is easier to out line the area you are going to be working on. The outline will keep you from going outside the lines with the tool you are using. This will allow you to work faster and on big areas with out messing up the area you want to save.

I use Paint Shop Pro as my Editor, I have been using it for years so this is the one I like because I have used it the most. I know other people that like other programs. I like this one because to me it is a user friendly program to me. Many scanners come with Powerful Editors in their software, you may have to get the manual and do some reading on how to. There are also web pages of people that work and explain how to use different programs. Paint Shop Pro is about $100.00 in the store. As you will see in the next pictures I went a little father and put color into the photo. In Paint Shop you are give an tool called "Manual Color Correction" witch will allow you to out line and area and tone the picture using preset colors.

I wish to thank Trista (I’ll be just the fine pretending I’m not) W. for allowing me to work oh her posting of her GGGrandmother.

Another of my friends of many years, Carol and I was talking about editing photos and she said she had one photo of her family.

I think she said her father died just after this picture was taken. Carol was a young girl in the picture taken about 1955. I told her to scan in the picture very large and send it to me. The file was over 10 meg but was just right for me to work on. The photo was scratched to a point of no repair in parts of it, and someone had used a crayon to write the names of the people on the photo. Boy what a mess!!! Well like I said I took made the photo into a black and white and then back to color. This gave me a true B&W picture with out the crayon colors.

I used the cloning brush to replace the crayon marks with other sections of the picture.

I cloned some of the trees and made it fill in around the people.

The hard part was putting the color into the picture. I had to out line each section and pick a color to fill dye the gray bits of the picture. Kind of fill in the lines with color. No I did not know what colors the people had on but then no one else could remember. I just picked the colors I liked.

As for the skin tone I now what tone my friend has, so I used the same tone for all of the people’s skin. The differing tones of gray made the color come out darker on some and lighter on others.

My friend Carol is the little girl in the front row, I put a green dress on her.

I know I am not a writer, and this is really just to show you what can be done on your computer. I think it is a shame to lose our history of pictures when it can be fun to restore them. And because of computers and programs easy for almost anyone to do.