HOW TO DIGITALLY RESTORE

YOUR ANTIQUE PHOTOGRAPHS

by Joelle Steele

You’ve got a beautiful old photograph of your great-great grandmother, the only known photograph of her. Too bad it’s got cracks, scuffs, and tears, some of the damage running right through her face. Fortunately, there are people like me who restore these photographs on the computer, removing most, if not all, traces of damage. But if you are highly motivated, you can do it yourself. You’ll need a flatbed scanner, a fairly high-end image editing software such as Photoshop, and a lot of time and patience.

Scanning

You might be tempted to forego the scanner and just use your digital camera to duplicate your ancestor’s damaged photograph. I’ve done both, but I get much better results from scanning at high resolution (600 dpi). This is very important when you are restring a photo, because you need to have a lot of pixels (those little square things you see when you enlarge a photo onscreen) in order to successfully repair damaged areas and still have the photo look like it did when it was first taken.

However, do not scan glass plate photos such as Daguerreotypes or tintypes as the long exposure to light is harmful to them. Use a camera to photograph them instead. And, if you don't have a scanner or need to scan something that exceeds the size of your scanner's bed, you will need to use a camera. If you use a camera, put it on a tripod. The slightest jiggle of the camera will blur the image, and you won't see it until you bring it up on the computer monitor -- you can't usually see anything but large blurs on even the biggest digital camera screens.

How you scan a photo will determine how well it can be restored. Begin by very carefully removing the photo from its frame and mat, if it is currently mounted. Do not remove glass plate photos from their cases. Do not try to remove old cellophane tape or any smudges of dirt, as doing so can often cause additional damage that is even harder to restore digitally.

Place the photo face-down on the scanning bed and then scan it at a minimum of 600 dpi, and at the same size as the original dimensions. For example, if the original photo is 5x7, scan it as a 5x7 image at 600 dpi, not as an 8x10 image at 600 dpi. The settings for resolution are usually found in your scanner software under "settings" or "tools," or possibly in some other pull-down menu in the scanner software. Some scanner software makes the resolution decision for you, but you can always override that decision by changing the settings yourself. That also ensures that you get the highest resolution necessary.

As a rule of thumb, the smaller the face (as in a tiny photo or faces in a group shot), the higher the dpi at which you should scan it. You can never go wrong with a 1200 dpi scan. The only problem you may have with a high resolution scan is if you don’t have a lot of space on your hard drive or very much RAM on your computer, because a single large scan can take up as much as 120 MB or more of space on your drive, and the manipulations of such a big file can be very slow, even on a fast processor. Once you have completed your restoration, you can reduce the image to 300 dpi so that the finished file is much smaller. Or, if the photo is very small and you want to be able to make a 5x7 print of it, you can leave it at 600 dpi to allow for enlarging.

Save your scanned photograph as a TIF file, not as a JPG or JPEG file. The JPG file structure is unstable for long term use as it slowly degenerates each time the file is opened, so that over a period of time you will lose color and clarity. If you ever need to send someone a photo over the Internet, just make a JPG copy of your TIF file and send it instead.

When you name your newly scanned file, designate it as the original scan, e.g., MarySmith-orig scan.tif. Then make a copy of that file and call it something like MarySmith-edit.tif. That latter file is the one you are going to restore. Once you are done with the restoration and do not have any need of the original (which you keep in case the edit copy is damaged or you make a huge mistake and have to start over), it can be deleted.

Editing or Restoring

The undamaged parts of the photo must look right before you start the repairs, because you are going to use the undamaged parts of the photo to repair the damaged areas. This means you may need to make a few adjustments to the photo before you even begin to address the damage.

Color. If you are restoring a true color photograph -- not a sepia tint or a yellowed photo -- you will need to maintain the color, but correct it for any imbalances due to aging that may have caused reddening or bluing or a general fading of the color. This means experimenting with the color adjustments in your photo editing program, such as hue, saturation, lightness, and color balance, until you understand how they work, and then using those controls to improve the color and make it look more natural. Don’t be discouraged – this takes a good eye and a fair amount of time when you’re doing it for the first time.

Contrast. The next step is adjusting the contrast and brightness, which are usually adjusted at the same time. Make the brightness and contrast changes very gradually, as you do not want the photo to become overly dark or overly light, nor do you want it to be so heavily contrasted that it looks more like a black and white drawing. We’re going for clarity and sharpness here, but it is better to get close to clear and sharp rather than going too far.

Enlargement. Once the photo looks right to you, enlarge it onscreen (zoom in) so that you can zero in on the pixels in the part(s) of the photo where there is damage. In most cases, a photo has damage in a variety of areas, and sometimes you won't be able to see the rest of the photo while you work. You will need to reduce it and enlarge it over and over again to view your progress. Most restoration is best done with at least a 19" monitor to expose as much of the photo as possible when enlarged.

Tools. Most image editing or image management software, like Photoshop, have numerous kinds of tools that can be used to manipulate an image. My favorite tool for restoration is the clone stamp. It is a tool that allows you to pick up (copy) pixels from the area surrounding the damaged area and place them (paste) on top of the damaged area, in as few as one pixel at a time, depending on what the finished result looks like after you try it out. Generally, the more detail there is in the damaged area (e.g., a face would normally have far more detail than the background of the picture), the fewer pixels at a time you want to replace. As you make a replacement, reduce the size of the photo back down to a smaller size and see if your work blends in seamlessly with the rest of the photo. Then either redo it or go back and finish restoring the rest of that damaged area, continuing to reduce the photo to its smaller size and check it out each time you make changes.

Saving. When doing this kind of work, it is important to save really frequently as you work. For example, if you do something and it looks good, save it. If you do a little more and you're satisfied with it, save again. If you’re using Photoshop you can use the “step backward” function to go back and redo something you just did, but beyond that you can only revert back to the last saved version of the file, so you don't want to throw away a bunch of hard work simply because you made an error after doing a lot of work that was just fine but was not saved. You might want to keep several versions of the file as you're doing the restoration. You can always delete them when you're done.

Sepia tint. Once you are completely satisfied with the photo and all the scratches and other marks, etc., are gone, you can color correct or tint your photo. If you have a photo that was originally a black-and-white or a sepia tone, start by changing the mode from "RGB color" to "grayscale." This removes all color from the photo, including yellowing or other discoloration. To the make the black-and-white photo into a sepia tone, change the mode back to "RGB color." Now you can use the color adjustment menu selection to add back some color to get the sepia shade you want or that matches the original. Then save you file.

How long does all this take? A single person portrait with minimal face damage usually takes me about an hour, and I’m pretty fast. A group shot with lots of damage can take much longer. These times are all dependent on the amount of damage and where that damage is, faces taking the longest. Your first restorations are likely to take you considerably longer, but hopefully not as long as my first restorations did: I restored three photos and each took me almost an entire day but, at the time, I had never used a computer to do a photo restoration, I didn’t scan them at high enough resolution, and I was working with a very simplified photo software that came with my old scanner and that I did not know how to use. My only experience prior to that was working with photos in a darkroom – almost 10 years earlier!

I’ve learned a lot about digital photo editing over the last twelve years, and my restored photo work has improved considerably, having restored over 4,000 photos so far. One of the things I’ve learned is that some restorations can only be partial at best, with only a slight reduction in the damage. But, some improvement is better than none at all. After all, your old photos are irreplaceable and therefore priceless. Restoring them digitally will allow you to not only easily share these treasures with other family members, but also to add a touch of reality to your ancestors for future generations to enjoy.