I have family photos from the 1940s and 1950s that I'd like to restore. Any tips?
I have PSE and NIk Collection. Can I scan and eit them, or do I need something else?
Any recommendations about scanning and scanners? Thank you!
I have seen where they actually photograph the old photo instead of scanning. I am not sure how you do this without glare. I have simply scanned and put through lightroom. mostly it depends on the original I find. professional photos (like my parents wedding photo) come out great. snapshots from the 40's and 50's are usually blurry and lacking a lot of information because of bad focus or exposure. but, ultimately I can usually make them look a bit better!
My preference is always is to forget the fancy-pants high-end programs that can only impose a factory-designed guess at what needs to be done to your particular images and use a VERY simple manual photo editing package such as Google Picasa or iPiccy.com, both free online and a bit of imagination to control tone contrast and sharpness to your liking, and a clone tool to wipe out folds and creases or repair missing fragments. It is well worth experimenting with these basic tools which allow full control, because there is no ready-made "one-size-fits-all" quick fix.
Any scanner will do, or you could simply re-photograph them with your digital camera. Both will give excellent results.
I think re photographing may give you better results unless you have a high end scanner. In the past, I have painstakingly manually removed dust and scratches in PS either with the rubber stamp or the spot healing brush tool. If you use the dust and scratches tool, it adds blur to photos that often already lacking in sharpness and focus.
Have fun, I didn't have nik collection back then
First, get the photos scanned by a professional store with a good scanner. Have them saved as tiff files, 16 bit. Or DNG. NOT 8 bit jpegs, you don't want the scanner interpreting a possibly flawed old photo. Look to pay 2 or 3 dollars for 4 or 5 images, less expensive the more you have usually.. Small "specialty" stores will charge lots more, up to 5 or 6 dollars each, and the quality of the result is almost always never appreciably "better." Have them saved on a Thumb Drive, or an SD card so you can get them on to your system.
And then load them into Photoshop/ACR. I would not use a "simple" editor as suggested by others, these are almost always 8 bit only, and you need all the detail of bigger depth files. Unfortunately, PSE is also only 8 bit I think. But then, better than nothing...
Others have suggested the editor tools to use, mostly the "spot healing brush" with "context aware healing" chosen, this is the default, to get rid of imperfections and spots. Go carefully with these, and use a small radius brush, many times over. Expand the size so you can actually see the pixels is a good idea, and emphasizes that many tiny strokes of a small brush is the best way to go.
You want to be very careful when removing what seem to be imperfections that you don't destroy the grain of the film. Indeed with analog photography, especially the old ones, the grain is often the charm, especially in the shadows, and removing that, "smoothing it away" that a larger brush can do makes the resulting image very flat that will not present well. Digital sharpening I have found seldom improves old photos that have been scanned professionally.
You may have most work to do around damaged edges, and here you have to be especially patient with small brushes. Adding vignettes, and perhaps even cropping out the really bad edges are all options, but don't overdo those drastic "last ditch" tools.
If the original shots are B&W, it can work to "convert" the fading and yellowing image to a Black and White in PS again, and think about toning that result yourself. Some variant of Brown or Sepia. You can do it yourself in PS (I always do, with a "color balance" adjustment layer mostly in the Shadows), or hand it off to Silver Efex, or even better DXO Film Pack, and think about adding a little of the classic analog film simulations in some of these tools. Do all this on duplicated background layers, and you don't have to be too subtle, you can always cool down the opacity of the layer to get it "just right."
With a faded color print, you might think to enhance the color, again manually in PS if you are up to it - best to convert to Lab color and use all those Lab tricks for color separation and enhancement, always doing any stuff on layers so you can blend them in with "blending options" panel, especially toning down opacity of the adjusted layer. And don't forget to experiment with the "blend mode" to add richness and contrast, I like the "overlay" and "soft light" group especially. This can work especially well on a B&W conversion too. But again, handing off to the Nik tools, or to DXO or similar for their "color" tools, if you want to have it done for you...
Do this color and tone stuff last, or at least after all the brush work. And remember, sorry to beat the drum on this yet again, many small brush strokes with a small brush will work much better than one or two large ones. So be patient, look to preserve real "grain" and work at least on a 300 or 400 percent magnification so you can see the small spots.
I second Frank's advice on getting the best scan possible to start with.
I first became interested in digital editing after I was quoted $500 to restore one photograph - I enrolled in a course & bought the editing software for less than that!
What model scanner / scanning software have you got? (there are huge variations as mentioned above)
I have found my scans are better than the 'professional' ones I have had made. ( maybe I have just not found the right place to go!). The scans that work best so far have been corrected using the scanner driver histogram pre-scan ( don't clip any pixels though) but without using the scan driver dust removal or fade correction etc.
Are you comfortable working in layers? ( mulitply blending mode can work wonders in bringing back detail on faded images!)
http://www.scantips.com/restore.html is a great starting place for the technical stuff - but have a go yourself because you don't have anything to lose (except a lot of time & a bit of sanity!!) I agree also that it is important to retain the 'essence' of the photo ( eg film grain can get lost with excessive "dust removal" filters.)
@ltodd@frankhymus@lisainstpete@wordpixman@jackies365 Thank you all for the thoughtful and detailed replies. I have quite a few photos from the 19040s and 1950s that I asked to keep as a teenager and have had them ever since. I'm so thankful I wrote my grandmother's descriptions on the back when she was able to tell me the information. I think I have someplace to start (during the winter) now.
Write a Reply
Sign up for a free account or Sign in to post a comment.
Tweets ahoy!
Join the Group
Pin With Me
Any scanner will do, or you could simply re-photograph them with your digital camera. Both will give excellent results.
Good luck!
Have fun, I didn't have nik collection back then
And then load them into Photoshop/ACR. I would not use a "simple" editor as suggested by others, these are almost always 8 bit only, and you need all the detail of bigger depth files. Unfortunately, PSE is also only 8 bit I think. But then, better than nothing...
Others have suggested the editor tools to use, mostly the "spot healing brush" with "context aware healing" chosen, this is the default, to get rid of imperfections and spots. Go carefully with these, and use a small radius brush, many times over. Expand the size so you can actually see the pixels is a good idea, and emphasizes that many tiny strokes of a small brush is the best way to go.
You want to be very careful when removing what seem to be imperfections that you don't destroy the grain of the film. Indeed with analog photography, especially the old ones, the grain is often the charm, especially in the shadows, and removing that, "smoothing it away" that a larger brush can do makes the resulting image very flat that will not present well. Digital sharpening I have found seldom improves old photos that have been scanned professionally.
You may have most work to do around damaged edges, and here you have to be especially patient with small brushes. Adding vignettes, and perhaps even cropping out the really bad edges are all options, but don't overdo those drastic "last ditch" tools.
If the original shots are B&W, it can work to "convert" the fading and yellowing image to a Black and White in PS again, and think about toning that result yourself. Some variant of Brown or Sepia. You can do it yourself in PS (I always do, with a "color balance" adjustment layer mostly in the Shadows), or hand it off to Silver Efex, or even better DXO Film Pack, and think about adding a little of the classic analog film simulations in some of these tools. Do all this on duplicated background layers, and you don't have to be too subtle, you can always cool down the opacity of the layer to get it "just right."
With a faded color print, you might think to enhance the color, again manually in PS if you are up to it - best to convert to Lab color and use all those Lab tricks for color separation and enhancement, always doing any stuff on layers so you can blend them in with "blending options" panel, especially toning down opacity of the adjusted layer. And don't forget to experiment with the "blend mode" to add richness and contrast, I like the "overlay" and "soft light" group especially. This can work especially well on a B&W conversion too. But again, handing off to the Nik tools, or to DXO or similar for their "color" tools, if you want to have it done for you...
Do this color and tone stuff last, or at least after all the brush work. And remember, sorry to beat the drum on this yet again, many small brush strokes with a small brush will work much better than one or two large ones. So be patient, look to preserve real "grain" and work at least on a 300 or 400 percent magnification so you can see the small spots.
There is a "From Snapshots to Great Shots" book on photo restoration that you might like to use. $20 or so at Amazon, at least in the USA.
https://www.amazon.com/Photo-Restoration-Snapshots-Great-Shots/dp/0134120116/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1469654839&sr=8-1&keywords=From+Snapshots+photo+restoration
You can see here where I started on my family restorations. You might find added information about what I discovered along the way in the information boxes.
http://365project.org/frankhymus/the-fifth-album/2016-05-19
Good luck! I hope you decide to post some here for us to see.
I first became interested in digital editing after I was quoted $500 to restore one photograph - I enrolled in a course & bought the editing software for less than that!
What model scanner / scanning software have you got? (there are huge variations as mentioned above)
I have found my scans are better than the 'professional' ones I have had made. ( maybe I have just not found the right place to go!). The scans that work best so far have been corrected using the scanner driver histogram pre-scan ( don't clip any pixels though) but without using the scan driver dust removal or fade correction etc.
Are you comfortable working in layers? ( mulitply blending mode can work wonders in bringing back detail on faded images!)
http://www.scantips.com/restore.html is a great starting place for the technical stuff - but have a go yourself because you don't have anything to lose (except a lot of time & a bit of sanity!!) I agree also that it is important to retain the 'essence' of the photo ( eg film grain can get lost with excessive "dust removal" filters.)
I an such a fan of Aaron Nace - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buiKADIIK9o for starters too..
A Sandbox tutorial at http://365project.org/discuss/themes-competitions/25145/sandbox-hand-coloring-old-photographs had some info & examples of restoration & coloring old images.