Picture restoration the costs

Justify the cost of a picture restoration.

With picture restoration there is no,” fix my picture” button. You cannot purchase a £700 software application to restore your picture with a button marked picture restoration. Its not as simple as just flicking a switch. Restoring the pictures requires time right from the start.

To appreciate the picture restoration procedure lets take a look at all the jobs involved.

To start any picture restoration the photo first has be made digital, whether the starting photo is negative or a positive print. To get the best from the source photo it should be scanned into a computer either with a negative scanner or a print scanner. Either way the picture must be scanned for optimum tonal range to ensure as much information is captured to enable a good picture restoration. There are actually one touch scanning methods that do this for your but these are far from the best method to get the required data for a good picture restoration. The scan needs to be performed by manually adjusting settings and customizing tone curves. This brings out the details, in the digital file to give it the best chance to be restored.

Once scanned the picture need to be cropped or trimmed to the correct aspect ratio for the desired print size, perhaps even adding a section to fill the proportions required. The next step in the picture restoration is to asses the resulting photo and find the best approach. Normally it would be to first balance the tones and correct any fading within the photo. For colour photos, correct the colour to as near normal as possible, this may need hand colouring to do this (this is normally performed after the restoration stage is complete). Hand colouring is a lengthy process of laying colours onto the photo and masking out sections so each individual component in the scene can have its own colour.

The actual picture restoration is the next stage. The photo needs to be cleaned of dust and scratches and blotches and blemishes. Cracks should be patched out and fold or tears mended. In some case this would mean filling large spaces with other parts of the photo to get the correct tone and texture matches. Where a facial rebuild is needed, great care must be taken to reconstruct a damaged face so that it looks untouched and normal or the human eye will detect something is wrong. We are so good at spotting defects on the human face even if we do not know the exact defect. Other references of the face may be needed in order to make a full picture restoration.

Once much of the picture restoration process has been completed the photo needs to be prepared for print. Once the print size has been agreed then the digital file needs to be optimised for that print size. Selection of paper is also important for the prints, choosing the correct finish to stay in keeping as much as possible to the original.

Once the funds for any work is complete the photos are emailed to a professional printing bureau to be printed. Once received they are then opened, checked over and posted out.

Next time you ask yourself this seems expensive spare a thought for how much time is invested in your picture restoration.



HDR is over used

HDR is over used and used badly is most cases in my opinion, you may find yourself agreeing with me but I think HDR is used a lost at the moment as a lazy way to cure an image that has no real substance in the first place.

thanks to Jascha400d from SXC.hu for the image

What is HDR? HDR is quite simply a relatively new technique used in imaging to combine several images, exposed for both highlights and shadows, to create an image where detail and tone is visible throughout the image. Under normal circumstances it is normally not possible to achieve this in just one exposure.

Everywhere I look I see examples of this technique, and in the right context it’s a great way to show off amazing textures and mood but already the novelty has worn off. I know for some this technique is very serious business and it’s another “tool” in the photographer’s box but with HDR there is something that’s missing from a normal photo, mystery.

Take a shot of a dramatic interior with light spilling down corridors with dark mysterious corners, chinks of light beckoning us to investigate the image further but not giving us enough detail to discover what is lurking there. Process with HDR and devoid of mystery, these sterile images give it all away. Detail is in everything, its omnipresent, nothing is left to chance. Nothing left to our imagination, like an operating theatre prepped for surgery, every surface clean with no surprises.

Fellow imagers, it’s great in small doses but don’t overdo it! Suggestion. Make a hybrid of the images, keep some of the mystery and develop a middle ground, or go back to basics and think about mood, mystery and magic that stems from the darkness. Think harder about the shot before auto bracketing and generating that sterile HDR!

What do you think?

To see other peoples input and views check out the picture restoration blog

Photo retouching for commercial and advertising

We have just launched two new sides to the photo retouching side of image-restore.co.uk. The Photo Retoucher is a new folio site showing some peices of work aimed at photo retouching and image retouching for commercial, magazines, fashion models and agencies

Photo retouching and image retouching for commercial, magazines, fashion models and agencies

and Wedding Retouching for wedding photographers a dedicted retouching service aimed at wedding photographers or anyone who takes pictures of weddings.

We hope that these new services will broaden the audience and launch a future for bigger and better photo retouching projects

Photo retouching

Photo retouching the eyes is a way to improve a portrait. This is a technique I picked up along the photo restoration and retouching road.

Above are some eyes from a portrait from Michael Herb at 204Studios. The eyes that need photo retouching have a round studio flash reflected in them. Some say this is attractive and softens the eyes but to some this look is very artificial and is a dead give away that the shot was taken in a studio. Maybe you want to add your own reflection in the eye that suits your style or location? I have included a layers snap shot of a process to change them.

The bottom layer has the reflection removed. The layer above “whites”, is a soft white brush sprayed in the whites of the eye and then reduced in opacity and masked. this softens the whites.

The “reflection” layer is a single dab of white masked to make a triangular-shaped reflection.

Above that is a small white dot, which simulates the main point of light.

Next up is a colour layer to add more of a warm hue to eyes with the centre pupil masked out.

Finally a splash of red also reduced on opacity in the corners of the eyes to remove the grey look and warm up the eyes some more.

The very top layer is just the original so we can refer back to it to see the changes we made.

You would then set about retouching the face and skin in your usual way. I hope this photo retouching eyes article helped you.

Neil

Repair a light leak on a photo

A light leak onto your film could be a disaster, if it is not too drastic you should be able to use photo restoration to restore it.

It is not as simple as it sounds though, they can be fairly complex. There are many ways to go about this but as with any task in Photoshop it’s what works best for the given task ahead. For this image some conventional restoration work or patching and cloning as well as using the colour channels, masks for adding back colour and detail from the original were used.

We can look at the individual colour channels to see which one is a good starting point for the restoration. What is most noticeable is the lack detail in this area, low in density and sharpness. This will be addressed later.

Here with the blue channel extracted and the original colour image thrown over the top, you can see how easy it would be to just clone all the colour back in setting the layer to “colour”. This is where the density of the underlying damage needs to be fixed. By selecting these and changing the levels and tones they can be evened out, although the banding, will have to be blended out later with some overlay dodge and burn layers.

Once the main areas have been balanced back to the tones of the undamaged areas the colour can be added back with the original layer set to “colour”. Surrounding colours can be cloned back in, or sampled and painted back in with a brush set to colour mode.

Once this has been achieved, the soft details need to be address with conventional patching and pasting sections over. To give an even tone to rigid inflatable, I had to copy a section from the front and paste and warp and set layer to darken, to add some shading and detail back in. Once the skirt of the boat was fixed the colours then had to be adjusted with hue saturation and exposure to get the correct glow to match the suns reflection on the bow.
The same technique was used to add details back to the other blurred areas.

Those of you who know photoshop may be asking why there is no full, step by step of this restoration? The reason is that the original file was 10600 pixels wide! And once you get those layers going in Photoshop the file soon crept up to 1000Mb and beyond, so each stage was flattened to keep my processor from going up in smoke!
The final steps were to remove the banding from the dividing lines between all the varying layers of light leak. This was done with a combination of dodge and burn overlay, and cloning areas from other parts of the image to piece it back together. As with any awkward photo restoration this does take time and is therefore not cheap.

Fixing a light leak on colour film

Restoring an old photo

Photo restoration of old photos with faces in is by far the trickiest of them all. It may not be known how the facial features appeared in the original and there may also be no reference. If this is the case then these features have to be retouched from pieces of the original photo. The restoration will have to down to the artists ability to recreate the face realistically and true to the character of the photo.

Photo restoration and rebuilding a face with a piece missing

In this close up crop of a photo, a grade 3 restoration, the nose and eyes are almost completely gone. There is no reference photo for the missing eyes and nose. This restoration was performed by taking what little information there was and teasing it out to complete the picture. A patch of skin tone was first applied to the nose area and then shaded in to match. The tiny piece of eye was cut and enlarged and flipped and then using the eye lines and pupil the missing eye was slowly rebuilt. The nose was built from the existing nose texture and then shaded and blended the texture.

These is no magic wand for a photo restoration like this, it is time and care that makes a face with a missing piece become whole again. It can sometimes seem that the final outlay for such a small amount of damage does not equate and that the effort that is put into restoring old photos is harder to appreciate.

“I was truly delighted with the photo restoration achieved by Image Restore. The 90 year old photo was badly damaged, particularly round the facial area. By the time Neil had worked his magic you wouldn’t have known it wasn’t in original condition. The work was turned round very quickly and communications were excellent throughout. Highly recommended.” L Davis 1st May 2010