Photo Restoration

Quick and easy. Client was wondering how her back garden would look if the big tree were removed. So the tree was digitally taken out, a new sky created and shadows removed from the lawn.    

A large A3 wedding photo rescued from the yellowing and fading that often afflicts wedding photos taken in the 70-80s. The bride was showing off the embroidery in the gown and the trickest part of this restoration was finding it in the gown and heightening its shape and colour. Because of the deep shade in the photo it was also tricky to get the right shade of ginger into the hair colour and the correct brown into the jacket - which had turned burgundy. The man had only recently died and the family had persuaded grieving Mum to freshen up the old wedding photo - which now has pride of place in her home.

This one was a challenge.This small 5cm-high photo had to be taken up to between A5 and A4 in size, coloured, and likenesses preserved. It had been taken with flash - which had blown out most facial features and colour. Fading, creasing, handling and grubbiness had spoiled much of the rest. I cropped it closely to avoid wasting time on inessentials and with the help of strong magnification, an old photo of the girl in red as an adult, the client at my elbow, and Photoshop tools and filters, we pulled all the pixels together and retrieved one of the rare photos of Mum and family that the family seemed to have. Client very, very happy.

This client, a lover of trains and rail ferries, brought me a large (A2) faded print of the Aramoana - New Zealand's first roll-on/roll-off vessel - leaving the Wellington Ferry terminal about 50 years ago. To do a good restoration you often have to do research, eg., the livery colours had faded away - and what was the colour and shape of the Kiwi Rail icon on the funnel? - After a good refresh it came up well. The horizon wasn't level but he wanted to leave it that way. Straightening would have clipped several cms off the lower left.

A badly creased, small photo - with missing sections - of the client's grandfather at 18 years of age. The creases had partly obscured subject's left eye, eye socket and cheek bone so these had to be rebuilt.The jacket had faded into the background in an area of the photo that was missing so that area needed to be recreated. The nose, ear and jawline needed redefining. Otherwise just removal of hundreds of crease marks, filling in missing backgound, selective lightening and darkening, enlarging to 10x14cm and printing out. Client wanted the photo to remain soft in focus.

A WWII photo of the client's father.  The entire photo needed cleaning up and repairing. The man's right eye was recreated from his left eye but the forehead, eye socket and upper cheek lines were very hard to pin, and faces so well-known by a family are critical to get right. (I had to get the client in several times to approve the likeness.) Photos from the internet helped me faithfully recreate the army jacket. I made the background cloudy to pass as a studio background - which it probably was. The photo had also been printed on textured paper, which the scanning process faithfully picked up, all of it needing to be smoothed out as much as possible. I ended up putting a fine grain over the entire photo to help disguise the bits of remaining texture. The client was one happy chappy. I used a less yellow tint.

This A4 photo - apart from some serious fading was not difficult to do.There were no scratches, tears or missing sections. It was clean apart from shabbiness in the background and some blemishes here and there. I needed help with the colours  in the jersey  and collar and the parents had no trouble recalling them. No problem matching the Samoan skin.This little girl died about 50 years ago at the age of 8 of a virus.

Some photos need enlarging   - they rarely need reducing though it's always easier to reduce than enlarge. The girl in this photo was only 3cm high in the original and had to be enlarged to 11cm. I cropped the original photo then preserved as much detail as I could while Photoshop used complex algorithms to create about 3 new pixels for every existing pixel based on average colours, tones and shapes around each pixel. This girl died as a teenager and there weren't many photos of her at the age she is in this photo. Some AI technology helped smooth away the noise introduced into the face during the enlargment process. I intentionally left noise in the background to put the focus on her face.

This photo was one about 80 prepared for use in a family genealogy book. Curves and levels adjustments and some selective sharpening brought him back to life.

The client wanted this proud occasion, the awarding of the nation's first teaching certificate to her beloved great aunt - to be remembered by the family. Unfortunately the A4 photo was badly creased, ripped in many places, and a large section - bottom left - was completely missing. The photopaper was textured - the bane of any restorer - faded and yellowed. The photo had also been taken with flash, which blew out a lot of detail. There was a large crease through auntie's nose, mouth and chin so that I couldn't reconstruct her face accurately. But the client looked like her great aunt, so I took a photo of her profile to help me out. Client delighted.

This photo, taken in South Africa in the apartheid era, was literally disintegrating and badly faded. The emulsion was cracking and flaking off all over. High-resolution scanning to capture as much data as possible also caught every crack, disfiguring faces and making restoration of true likenesses very time-consuming. Lots of reconstruction. The client was very happy and gave me a 10/10. The original was in colour but the client waived a colour restoration; the black and white had cost enough!! This photo was enlarged to fit on an A4 and printed out.

Clients often want composite photos prepared for ceramic memorial plaques. This client only had one suitable photo of her husband (deceased) who had to be dressed up in a graduation gown with mortar board, red tie bearing his collage logo, a lei around his neck, and his shirt turned from blue to white. Tapa cloth had to be placed over the weatherboards. Photoshop to the rescue. I took a photo of the client posing in her graduation gown and used the photo to get the folds right, the logo came off the college website, as did the tapa cloth and lei. Photoshop magic converted the blue shirt to white. The original photo was quite blurred and I was forced to use contrast and sharpening tools to try to remove blur. The photo is a bit over-sharpened as a result but I was also trying to bring it up to A4 size from a much smaller photo. Job completed, the client was in tears.

It's often not difficult to restore a faded photo as long as it is not marked and blemished as well. The photo was relatively unmarked. It was a greater challenge  to seamlessly match the light toning in the upper section of the photo with the darker sections that had obviously been underneath the frame. Frames don't always completely protect tonings or colour in old photos but they can be a good guide. I always scan black and white photos in RGB colour because there are more tools to work with. The dark section at the bottom showed up as a strong colour cast that I was able to correct for. The rest was just patching the join and matching the pinstripes on upper and lower halves of the suit. Voila - great-grandfather has returned to the family.

This photo is mainly about the sky. Apart from the need for a bit of tidying up and selective tonal adjustments the grave area wasn't too bad. The problem was the sky - which had faced back to nothing and was very dirty and scratched. I figured it was probably overcast. Rather than try to retrieve it I decided to replace it entirely. This was tricky because of the trees - particularly the one directly behind the gravestone. Photoshop has increasingly sophisticated tools to separate fine elements, e.g., hair or tree branches from their backgrounds so they can be placed against new backgrounds leaving little evidence of the transfer. I think this works pretty well.

It's not only photos that people want restored. This client wanted to clean up and hang some old house plans in her front foyer. The orginal was an old A3+ photocopy with all the fold marks and discolouration typical of photocopies of that era. She also wanted some drawings taken out, others enlarged and rearranged and terra cotta colour added to the roof.

The woman and man in the first photo were husband and wife. The client wanted both of them joined in a single photo to be made into a ceramic for a gravestone. The lighting for both faces couldn't have been more different: she underexposed and rather florid, and he taken with flash in artificial lighting, so I needed to add skin colour to him and remove it from her. The client also wanted her mother's double chins removed because they were a result of medication she was on. The oval was a guide to the people creating the ceramic.

A badly faded A4 size family photo taken in NZ before 1914. Once the image was corrected for exposure the sky proved to be featureless and covered with blotches and scratches. I need to create a replacement sky. There were no shadows cast by the horses so a sky that put the sun behind a cloud would work. But there was enough light around to hint that the sun wasn't far away. This sky worked well. I selectively heightened contrast and also put a vignette round the photo to bring the eye towards the man in the centre who died overseas in WWI.

When this photo arrived, it looked like a simple photo of a tank. But it had been signed by the client's mates when he was serving with NATO in Europe and the sun had completely faded the signatures. He wanted them back, but there was no ink only black dots. I scanned at the highest resolution possible using a format that would collect the maximum amount of raw data and every trick I knew of in Photoshop. Where people had pressed hard with a pen we were sometimes able to read the impression left in the paper and trace over that. We had to stop at 9 signatures - the other two defied rescue. The client's memory of what was originally there and of engineering slang helped a lot. I also got rid of the magenta colour cast on the original and used a sepia tint.

One of the messier photos I've had to work on. An A3. But it worked - with the help of Photoshop's clever box of tricks. The hands and ball had to be entirely reconstructed. The shirt was rescued by the addition of a free internet image of a white shirt that was layered and warped onto the original shirt. This portrait arrived with the one below - a challenging job.

This is one of three photos that all looked like the one on the left.  I almost turned the job down. They were of three siblings taken some time in the early 70s, all severely faded by the sun. Certain that the photos could not be retrieved I nevertheless scanned one image at the highest resolution I could and put it through some basic Photoshop adjustments to see if anything at all would show up. To my surprise the image started to appear but it was still an awful mess. The end results here are fragile images - meaning so much of the tonal range had got lost in the fading that I had only a very narrow tonal band to work with, and light and shade were very tricky to control without creating blotchiness. However it helped that all the kids were freckled!

An old family photo of the client as a child in the UK with parents, siblings and relatives. Yes, the original really was that colour! It always surprises me - but shouldn't really - when a client becomes emotional at seeing faded photos of loved ones come to life again. It's always a rewarding moment for the restorer when your careful work becomes a special and lasting gift to them.

This was a photo of a client's grandfather's Waikato farm where he used to spend a lot of time as a kid. It was large - 76cm x 50cm -and needed to be stripped right back to black and white and colour layered on from scratch. The original was too faded to give any guide to colour but Google came to the rescue with photos of farms from the same region so I was able to get the greens right. The sky had to be created from scratch - NZ-summer blue with high cirrus cloud. Artistic licence did the rest. Client was "stunned" and sent me an email with 7 smiley faces to show his delight. I couldn't find a scanner large enough to scan the original so had to take a photo of it. It only just worked; it was at the limits of my camera's pixel range.

This was one precious but very faded 6x10in photo of a young man who died young many years ago. His aged parents only had this photo of him and this restored version was rapturously received - and more copies ordered. The photo looks miraculously restored, and it is - but this is Photoshop at work. Once you get familiar with the tools (which can take a while!) it is amazing what you can do. Another much smaller cameo of the same man was also able to retrieved very quickly. Restoring to grayscale (as in this photo) is much easier, faster and cheaper than having to layer on colour that must look natural.

This photo and the one following that follow were some of about 80 I restored for use in a family genealogy, many of them oval minatures about 7cm high. Many were in a bad way, especially this one which seemed almost irreparable. The client didn't want too much time spent on it, so the quality could be better. The woman appears to be in a garden and the photo needed to be shades of  black (grayscale) for printing with black ink.

Sometimes photos just need removal of perspective distortions. This photo, taken with a cheap smartphone camera was to be used in colour in a family genealogy. Adobe Lightroom has some excellent perspective correction tools. I made the building perpendicular, removed the car, replaced the railings and pavement. The pavement had to be cloned from other areas of the image and the railings and bricks cloned and hand-drawn.

This old photo was literally disintegrating once it was out of its glass frame. The face of the woman - which the client was most interested in preserving - had faded away to very few features.The emulsion was breaking up all over the photo into hundreds of tiny cracks and flaking off. I couldn't scan it because scanning would enhance all the cracks making restoration a nightmare. I finally photographed it in low light to minimise the cracks and with use of magnifying glass, and numerous Photoshop tools I was able to recover enough of Nan's face to make the restoration work- just. You have to draw the line somewhere when the restoration is difficult and funds are limited. Fortunately the image was only 10cm x 10cm, helping disguise messes that would have been much more visible at larger size.

This photo is typical of wedding photos taken 40 years ago - badly faded and yellowed. They were roughly A4 size. Clients said the restored photos looked better than the originals.

The client wanted these two separate photos of her mother and father restored as one for a ceramic for their graves. I was presented with very poor orginals from a mobile phone at low resolution with no data at all in parts. The focus had to be on their faces. The 2 photos needed to be joined, to make it look as if the couple had been taken together, a t-shirt put on the guy, the photo coloured, resolution brought up to 300dpi and the background put behind both figures. Because the enlargement was significant and pixels needed to be created, I had to use a painterly approach because the data wasn't there to restore. In the end it worked - just!

Over a metre long, this old photo - discoloured, dirty and broken - was taken of Wellington in 1886. Detail from the lower left section of the repaired photo is shown in the enlargement. A join which ran through the right side of the enlargement is now invisible.

This was a memorial photo of the client's mother and he wanted the grandchild removed so the many other grandchildren would not feel left out. This involved recreating parts of Mum's ear, cheek, jawbone and clothing. The photo was technically challenging in that a small 180dpi digital photo had to be enlarged to A3/ 300dpi. He was delighted with the result.

The frocks on the two girls had faded and time had introduced a red colour cast. In addition there was a large red stain to the left. I decided to trim the photo, enlarge the girls and their mother and get rid of the stain in the process. I used solid colour adjustment layers with masks and layer opacities to remove colour casts from skin and hair and restore natural colour.

This job originally came to me as a mother and daughter photo that was so torn and faded that it was impossible to restore facial resemblance. Fortunately the client had another much smaller photo - relatively unfaded but with a man in the centre. I suggested a good workaround would be to remove the man, draw the 2 women closer together and enlarge the photo. OK, Give it a go, she said, and was very happy with the result. Enlarging a photo from small to A4 size can soften and blur it, but Photoshop comes with some great sharpening tools.

A large (A3) family photo taken in the 1950s, cracked and badly faded. This had to be stripped back to black and white and colour added in layers. The client was able to give me rough guides to colour.

This client wanted an unknown marriage celebrant removed from an A4-sized photo of her wedding in Thailand. Removing him and keeping the photo the same size meant reconstructing the right side of the photo, the verandah area, and pathway. This was the most complex of 7-8 photos the client wanted edited, enhanced, tonally adjusted and printed out.

Another 1950s era photo criss-crossed by fine cracks and badly faded. The photo had to be stripped back to black and white and contrast pumped up to give me some definition to work with. Colour had to be layered on area by area, the tie itself needed at least four layers of different colours. This was an A3 photo.

A challenging wedding photo taken 40 years ago. It had faded back to yellow and details of the gown and sky had blown out to nothing, meaning there was no data at all to work with. I also had no miniature originals to work from. This was an A3 photo.

A man in his sixties wanted this restoration as a surprise for his wife for their wedding anniversary. Unfortunately the original photo was taken with flash (which blows out facial features), and time had both faded the colours and introduced a green colour cast. I was not satisfied with the final flesh tones, and only later discovered another technique that would have worked better.

This was one of the first colour restorations I ever attempted. Looking at it now it's obvious to me that the woman's hair is too dark and the face needs more light and shade. But not bad for a first go!

A very under-exposed photograph given to me for use in a client's genealogy book. Often photos for precious genealogies are in a very poor state and the entire book suffers as a result. There were over 160 photos in this genealogy all of which needed photo editing of some sort.

A very small precious very faded family photo with crease marks and stains. After editing it was 5x the size and looked a whole lot better. Photoshop is amazing!