Can you restore a panorama photograph?

In short the answer is yes!

Here is the long answer. Over the years photographers have been taking Panoramas, school photos and groups of large people were often shot in panorama, army, navy, military groups and schools, even extended families. The longest so far I have restored is 53 inches wide!, 7 inches short of the widest I can have printed. The image was of the 17 windmills of Kinderdijk - Kinderdyke in Holland. The photographer had shot the scene on wide format film, at a guess on 6cm roll film and used a rotating camera to turn the film and the camera head at the same time to expose a length of film long enough to produce a photo 53 x 10 inches long. Alas the photo was left outside in the rain in the frame and stuck to the glass after a family feud. In order to get to me it had to be scraped off the glass with a wall paper scraper, rolled in up and put in an aluminium tool box and posted. I could then scan it in many sections and res stitch the photo into one piece. After intense restoration and at 47 Million pixels it was re printed on high quality archive ink jet paper.

Typical damage right across the whole panorama.

The above is a small section from the restored photo of the far right hand side of the panorama showing just how detailed it is!

More often photos of regiments, war photos, pupils in the entire school were photographed in this manner. Normally this type of photo is stored rolled up and in the loft. Moisture in the air and the constant heat and cold will have made the paper brittle, so when it is unrolled it may crack. Be careful it may break up. Should you decide to get it restored then it will have to be unrolled to be scanned. If you are posting it please put the rolled photo into a piece of large diameter tube, a carpet roll is best, or roll loosely and put in a card board box, padded out with tissue. A reunion of old army fellows, or royal navy chums often calls for the photos to be pulled out from storage but be prepared for some damage to be evident but do not fear as they can be restored. If there are many faces in the image, perhaps as many as 500 or more and the damage runs through the faces then the image can take some time and money to restore. If complete faces are missing and fully restored photo is required then the only way to fill in the gaps is with another face.

• Yes Panorama images can be restored

• Post them rolled up in a carpet tube

• They will cost much more than a normal 10×8 to restore

• They will be re reprinted on archive quality paper with archive inks up to 60 inches wide

I hope this helps

Neil

Photo restoration of animal photos

Photo restoration of animal or pet photos is just as important as restoring photos of your family. After all they are family too. Here I am showing the progress through restoring photo a dog.

The photo is heavily damaged but with some careful thought it can be restored.

The dog’s toe pad has been replaced with the large black foot pad but scaled down and rotated and squashed. Above that some shadow has been cloned into the white space as in picture 1

You can see the muzzle has been cleaned up a bit here, using the patch tool and clone tools.

I have also copied the yellow dog toy from the left and pasted it to the right. I pasted again and flipped the yellow ball and with the patch and clone rebuilt the right hand side of the toy. I made sure there was some flash shadow around the ball in a slightly red tinted shadow to match the other side.

Finished cleaning up the muzzle and shadow underneath with clone tools and patch.

Here I have used the left side of the leg and clone upward towards the ball. I flipped this leg edge and used it for the right side.

Fortunately the customer had another photo of the dog lying down and I able to distort and warp the rear leg to replace much of the missing leg.

From the second photo I was able to use some belly fur and shade it with the dodge and burn tools. I added some flash shadows behind the newly added leg parts.

I reduced the red tint to the back and grey sofa and zoomed out for the finished product.

Hopefully you will look after your photos and not need to get your pet photos restored.

Can an original photograph be repaired

To understand more about whether or not an original photo can be restored we need to look at how the photo paper is made.

Original photos are made from layers. Old black and white photos were often made from fibre based paper. The base papers themselves would have been made in paper mills and the top coating of light sensitive chemical based sulphates called “baryta” was then added to produce the photographic paper. Once exposed to light and developed the positive image is embedded in the “baryta” or emulsion. If this top layer gets damaged there is no way to build up the layer and replace it. You cannot add wax or pen or ink, nothing comes close to the original emulsion. If some of the fibres of the paper have come away, then what? These cannot be replaced either, you cannot simply glue down new ones! Even if it were possible to put back a blank filler into the hole, there is no way to reproduce the grain structure that was there in the original, or the subtle tones and shading of the original photo.

The same goes for colour photos, the resin or solid polyester top coat cannot be replaced with anything, I cannot be built up and restored. If there was a way to do this that was commercially available, there would not be so many digital photo restoration companies offering their digital restoration services today!

Sorry but it is not good news if own a damaged photo and want the original restored.

Is my old photo an original?

The question is, is it an original?

 Preserving photo and Genealogy isn’t new. more than likely somewhere in the family collection of old photos there are some that look a little smoother and shinier than the other, they still look old but just not as wrinkled.

Take a look at these carefully, can you see the scratches and creases, fold marks and tears but is the photo perfectly smooth? If so it is more likely to be a copy of an original. Unfortunately if this copy was made a while back when scanning technology was not so good, it may have been scanned with a first generation scanner and printed in a high street lab when photo labs were numerous, around the 70’s and 80’s and 90’s. The chances are the tonal range within the reprint has changed dramatically from the original.

If you can turn the photo over, on the back may be printed “Fuji” or “Agfa” or “Kodak” in a faded font but clear as day, the paper itself is kind of plastic and not really papery at all. Very old photos were printed on paper made from pulp, made up of many layers of fibres, plastic papers just don’t have these and should be easy to spot.

In scanning the tones would have been averaged by the scanner and then when reprinting, the machines would have averaged again and much of the mid tones would have been lost. When it comes to making a restoration of this for the third time around, bringing out the details and enhancing the photo and making the restoration, is going to be somewhat disappointing, than if it were direct from the original. The mid tones are what helps create shape and form to objects, the subtle shadows on some ones face,without these the photo will be just black and white and be very contrasty with little detail.

Lessons to learn here are, make sure that if you do end up making copies of old photos, make sure you still keep the original, no matter what state it is in! If you have to make a copy try to get it done professionally to ensure the maximum tonal range available, to allow for the best detail and best future photo restoration.

Restoring a photo with cracked emulsion

A while ago I was given the task of restoring a badly damaged old board based photo. The photo had been kept in a garage and had been kept in moist air and teh exposed to excessive heat. This has caused the unprotected photo emulsion to first crack and then flake off, leaving the photo in a seemingly unrepairable state.

 

This is the top left quarter of the photo in question. Other parts top right, bottom_left, bottom right. As you can see they are very badly damaged. In this close up you can see the flaked emulsion and cracks very clearly, there is not much original image left!

The normal way to tackle this would be to use some sort of de-crack filter. The only problem with using this is that it cant deal with such a vast amount of white, yes it will work on small cracks but not ones as big as these. In using such a filter it will only go so far and other methods to repair the damage and cracks have to be found. It turned out that a clever use of the patch tool and one of my own custom actions, (sorry top secret I cant post it) helped me fill in a vast amount of cracks, but it had to be small sections at a time, to retain the correct tones throughout the damaged parts of the image. The background was replaced with a custom graduated fill and then wallpaper and door frame details were added, with a mask around the main figure to blend it all in. The grain was then matched as best as possible and the foreground tones and shadows were evened out and enhanced.

 

Once compete a surprising amount of detail showed through the maze of cracked and flaked emulsion.

Photo restoration skills to create art

You can use your photo restoration skills to create a realistic photomontage.

Below is a tutorial that will help you create a never ending staircase using your developed photo restoration skills. If you are still a bit rusty then go back and read the blog.

Never ending staircase

Photo restorations normally take up most of my time but lets create some art today by following this tutorial on making a never ending staircase using PhotoShop, Textured with wood, stone, grass or whatever you choose. When you see photo restorations, I expect you wonder how they were done, its the same for illusions. Here is how to make your own photo montage illusion.

Make a document in photo shop around 4000 x 2000 pixels. File / new / and fill in the pixels width and height.

In order for this to work we need to see the rulers in centimetres.

View / rulers Then right click on the now visible ruler and select centimetres.

We also need to see the grid now. View / show grid

Now go to View / Snap to / Grid, to make sure the lines we draw are all consistent.

To check that your screen settings are the same as mine go to edit / preferences / unit and rulers

copy these settings in the above image

Back to the image.

On a new layer draw with the polygon lasso tool from the tools palette, a diamond. Use 5×3 squares per quarter to draw your diamond shape. This gives us an angle of just about 30 degrees which is very important for this to work.

On new layers, draw the other two shapes as per the image above. Now merge the layers. Select the freshly drawn layers in the layers palette and merge them using Layer / merge layers.

Copy the layer and paste and repeat this and arrange the steps as the image below.

Select all these layers in the layers pallet and duplicate them all. Right click in the layers palette and select, duplicate layers. With the layers still selected flip them. Edit / transform / flip horizontal. Use this process by ordering your layers and copying and pasting to get the result below.

Now let’s use something to make to the steps look more real.

Find a picture of a stone slab or a piece of wood, plastic, metal or even grass and cut it out into the shape we first drew, (the diamond and its edges). You can do this on a separate layer and change the opacity of the layer in your layers palette so you can see the original diamond step underneath. Using wood this can be achieved fairly easily. You may need to use the warp or scale tools, or liquefy (sorry I won’t be explaining how to use these tools here – but search the net I am sure you find what you are looking for)

Now repeat the steps we used to create the stair case and position your steps above the others and you will have your staircase. Now use it creatively! You can experiment with amount of steps just by shortening the sides of the stair case using the grid we first set up.

Here is one in stone! I created this myself with some stone slabs and some clever cloning and shading.

A larger version of this optical illusion never ending staircase

A larger version of this optical illusion never ending staircase

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial brought to you by image-restore photo restoration service www.image-restore.co.uk restorations of old and damaged photos.

Add images to your family tree

There are many publications on the magazine shelves and several TV series to keep reminding us of how important our family histories are.  Scrapbooking, Genealogy, family trees and digging around for old photos is very much on the mind of many people today.

When you create your family tree do not forget the photos as well. The visual side of the ancestry helps with putting a face to the names. To help smarten up your family tree arrange your photos or portraits alongside the names on the tree, so when you can’t remember what great uncle Cartwright looked like, he is right there for you. What ever you do don’t stick down the original photos, get your photos copied and restored and a digital copy, to make an on-line family tree for your relatives to share.  Keep the original safe and sound away from sunlight and in a dry place.

TOP TIP: If you want to see great uncle Cartwright above the fireplace then have your original photo restored and reproduced, so you can display the reproductions around the house in prominent, well lit places, will no fear of further fading and damage.

Scanning for photo restoration with an all in one

With the cost of living ever increasing electronics manufacturers are more than happy to produce ever cheaper equipment for our everyday needs. Cheap printer, scanner, copiers are everywhere these days, even in your local village supermarket. This is where the trouble starts. They do seem like a bargain don’t they? All that functionality for under £40 pounds!

STOP. If you are thinking of buying this to scan in your family photos for archiving them and restoration when you have the time or when you can afford a photo restoration service then please take my advice, think again. Why? The optics on these devices are designed for everyday scanning and printing. When scanning an image to produce a high resolution file for restoration, the software and optics together often produce a “fluffy” scan.

Let me explain. On an original photo, take a look at the dark and light areas between two objects or surfaces; say a dark door and light wall, or the rim of someone’s spectacles against their pale skin. The edge between the two is sharp and straight. Now scan it on your new scanner copier printer and blow up that section, it’s now a fluffy line with little definition. If you then save it with medium to heavy JPEG compression, this will only go to destroying what little detail is left.

What is happening is the substandard optical glass in the scanner is being supplemented with software interpolation. As the optics are not up to scratch to give a good, high resolution scan the accompanying software is adding in pixels to made the scan bigger. Two wrongs don’t make a right, one just makes the other worse.

Does it really matter? Well if you try to make a perfect circle from Lego bricks, it is very hard to do. When a face needs rebuilding in a restoration and the only pieces are “fluffy” edged, then it is very hard to do and much better result can be obtained from a high quality scanner. Better to make a good scan from a professional scanner and spend less time restoring it. If you are using me to restore your photos then it will cost less if it takes less time.

Replacing backgrounds and matching grain

i posted a  matching grain article a while ago and this is a follow on.

Below is one method of match grain when replacing part of an image or background.

Look at this image, it is part of a man’s shoulder and the background could do with evening out or replacing altogether.

Here I have just selected and deleted the back ground to white. It does not look at all right.

Above a blur might clean up the background. Whilst evening out the background it still does not match very well.

Here I have added some grain (noise) but it still does not match. If I apply a blur to this then we can achieve a better result.

With a slight blur its much better and using the correct selection technique for the original background selection it looks fairly convincing. Using this matching grain technique and varying the amounts of grain and blur ratios and perhaps even repeating the process a few times along with varying the type of noise, we can achieve different patterns of grain to suit nearly every situation.

Imagination and repair.

In this post I have included a couple of photo repairs that illustrate what many of my previous posts have talked about. Many of these techniques described have been used in these two repairs.

In the first example which I have called “motorbike mess” a large chunk of the image is missing and it has very large tears and creases and cracks. Most of the superficial cracks could be patched away sampling from suitable nearby areas or textures that matched the missing details. The largest crack through the middle needed a little more attention. This is where the sliding block puzzle technique, of cutting pieces using the correct selection technique and pasting and repositioning, slowly piecing together the missing details. The clone tool can come in handy here too.

I had to recreate the engine mountings and not knowing the exact model of the bike and having no photo records, I had to use some imagination. Internet references were found and I could get some idea. The huge chunk missing in the top corner and windows down the top right were added using vanishing point, followed by patch and clone. It too around 5 hours mind you and turned into very much a personal challenge.

Before I started the creases and tears and missing pieces seemed like a daunting task.

After. Like any restoration I can go on forever, but I had to stop somewhere.

The second restoration consisted of 3 separate photos to make into one. Almost half the photo was missing but fortunately the customer had other wedding photos on that day, which supplied a reference for the coat and the hair and missing chin and background. With the correct selection technique and a fair bit of dodging and burning on separate layers the image was back together and a very good repair was achieved.

Before, showing the 3 photos used to complete the photo repair.

After photo repair. Both I and the customer were very pleased.

This is just a summary of the photo repair techniques involved but if you go back through the posts you will find many of them described in more detail.

Early seasons greeting to you all and there is still time to get your photos repaired and restored before Christmas!

Photo repair and CS4 for photographers upgrade

Looking at Photoshop with photo repairs in mind is CS4 worth the upgrade?

There are a few features that have been added that might aid us photographers aiming to do photo repairs. Notably the first is the graphic acceleration of some operations. However reading deeper into the blurb and some reputable reviews, the graphics acceleration is not actually going to help us photographers very much. The rotation and zoom controls are accelerated by your graphics card but not the filters. The only way these will speed up is with a faster processor and even then I am not sure this helps that much. As us photo repair men use the filters quite a lot for selections and making etc then this is of little use.

Another feature that has been added is something called content aware scaling. This enables an image to be stretched or shrunk without altering the content of the image and maintain the content in proportion by removing data that is not needed. I have included an example of a BMW car that I squashed. Notice the wheels are still round and most of the cars features still look normal. This feature can be used for making wider format images quite successfully especially if you want to stretch a landscape. However, this is not worth the upgrade particularly when you can find this tool, “Resizor” elsewhere on the net and free. You may have to resourceful in your search but it is there. This feature could also be used to fit an old photo to a more conventionally proportioned modern day paper size.

So what else if there to offer? The last feature that I noted was colour range selection by local clusters. It is a fancy way to select colours with similar colour range within a specific area. The zone of the area can be controlled. Once again this is something you can quite happily do with a circular faded mask and then select your colour range within that area.

Over all then is worth the upgrade? In short no, not if you are just performing photo repair like me. Don’t waste your money and stick with CS2 or CS3

Photo repair for mending your memories

Photo repair, tips for scanning torn photos

You may find that when you go to do a photo repair the photos that you want to repair are in more than one piece. When scanning an old photo with the intention of repairing it you may want to check what your scanner is up to again. See Saving you images correctly. When you scan two bits of a photo you may find that the two halves end up looking completely different. The tones and exposure and even colour may look great on one half and totally different on the other, what is going on?

When your scanner when set to automatic just like a digital camera set to “auto”, it will exposure and correct the image where and how it sees fit. Images with more dark tones in them, may be compensated for and end up lighter and vice versa for light images ending up darker. Colours may even change too. This does make photo repairs all the harder.

It is best to set your scanner to manual and switch off all the automatic settings and keep the scanning resolution the same. Turn off the auto tone, brightness, contrast, colour sections and just scan in colour, as basic as you can get. This way both scans should end up the same in their tones and exposures and size. You can then be sure when you are trying to match up the two halves that they will meet easily and make the photo repair simpler too.

Photo repairs and fixing your old photos.

Preserving detail when saving images

The effects that over compressing a JPEG file can have on your images.

Before a photo repair can be carried out the digital file needs to be saved correctly. Perhaps when you scan in image from a print, slide or negative your scanning software does it all for you, its simple you just hit the go button and the job is done. Have you ever looked at the settings within the software to see how the software is saving your image? or if it gives you any options to alter the way the file is saved or scanned? Saving without compression or little compression is the best way to preserve detail in your image. A JPEG file is a “lossy” format, or a format where data is discarded in order to save space when saving. The higher the compression the more data is thrown away and the less detail there will be in your image.

There is no excuse these days, when hard disks are so very cheap to save your image with any other setting other than the best. It might be worth examining the software the came with your scanner or camera and check that you do have the option to change the way it saves and what format it saves your images in. Phrases to look for in the manual or software settings are “best setting” or the “lowest compression”, “lossless format” or “large file size”. You get the idea but do look for the top setting.

To give you idea of what goes on when you save I have included an example below.

It is a photo of a group of people. now let us save it at different compression ratios.

As you can see the further we go with the compression the worse the data becomes and more the image suffers. The blocks you can see in the “0%” corner are where the JPEG algorithm splits up the photo into blocks in order to save it, the more data that is thrown away the more blocks there are visible. When this happens across a detailed section of the image the detail is lost, blocks meet and slurring of colours and details occur. This is called JPEG artefacts. It is these artefacts we do not want when our software takes over and saves our images for us.

On a further note, if you do save an image in this manner and then open it and make changes to it and re-save it with the same settings then the image will just get even worse.

In order for a restoration to be carried out to a high standard then highly compressed files must be avoided!

Image-Restore Helping repair old photos

Having fun with text and ripples

If you are looking for the restoration posts you can jump to the latest one here

Making ripples in Photoshop

Start by creating a new file around 3000 pixels square.

Your colour palette should be set to white foreground, black background

Choose filter/render/clouds then Filter/blur/motion blur angle 0, around 350

At this point I though the contrast was a bit lacking for the effect I was trying to create so I hit the auto levels button

More blurring. Filter/blur/motion blur around 350

Smooth out the blur effect slightly with filter/noise/median. Set to around 20

Select all and use the Edit/transform/perspective to crunch down the perspective so it looks like the waves are heading off into the distance. You will then need to use the “scale” from the same menu to squash this down vertically to stretch out the waves even more. And then scale it wider for more stretching.

Another quick auto levels to adjust the contrast again.

Now we add some lighting effects to bring in some enhancement of the waves.

Convert image to RGB mode if not already.
Use filter/render/lighting effects single spot and have a play with what give the most pleasing contrast enhancement to the waves. Something central and above gives a moonlight sea effect. Crop the image to encompass the best bits of the sea.

Please take note here. The waves are completely random and you will end up with different looking waves to me.

Add new layer
Select text tool and white text
Type your word slogan or company name
Enlarge so that the text is a good size.

Duplicate this layer
Set the top layer of text to blending mode “overlay”
Set the bottom layer of text to blending mode “exclusion”
bevel and emboss text of the top layer using the layers pallet.

Add reflection, by duplicating the text layers and selecting them both. Rasterize these layers and merge them together.

Edit/transform/scale and drag from the top through to the bottom to scale the words upside down, about two thirds height of the original text.

Edit/transform/perspective and widen out the words to give a slight perspective.

In order for the next bit to work we need to scale down the whole image to around 400 to 600 pixels wide.

Make a rectangular selection around the lowest part of the perspective text and feather to around 10 pixels and delete. This is to fade the text into the water. You may need to adjust the levels or brightness to get the effect you like best.

Now from the filters menu select distort/ripple/ -100
Finally adjust the opacity till you are happy with effect.

If you like you can add a colour overlay layer to blue.

More to come in the next post…

Photoshop fun making an eyeball

I am just having a change from the photo repair posts and though i would bring some fun to the blog with how to make an eyeball.

Colour Pupil and Iris

This is a texture that I found to be very effective for the Iris of an eye.

Start by creating a new file around 1000 pixels square.

Your colour palette should be set to Red foreground, white background or

You can use Red foreground, black background if you want flecks of red in your iris.

Filter/render/clouds
Filter/texture/stained glass/ cell size 10/ light intensity 4/ border 3
Filter/blur/radial blur zoom/distance 80

Image/Adjust/Invert
Image/adjust/exposure (adjust for more contrast)

New Layer. Draw circle on a new layer. Almost filling the canvas. Feather 1 pixel and fill with black.

Next from the drop down menu, Select, modify/contract/ set to 6.
Feather the selection by 5, delete. You should now be left with a dark ring.
On a new layer draw a new circle for the pupil, not too big and fill with black.

In the Layers pallet, select this layer and add outer glow. Choose a green that compliments the blue textured iris. Make it wide and diffused, just play with the setting until you are happy.

On a new layer create the highlights by drawing a circle and filling with whit, but use the graduated fill set to colour to transparent. Shape the catch light how you like, but bear in mind you should be following the curvature of the “ball” of the eye.

On new layers add more catch lights or reflections as you so desire and vary the transparencies of the layers to get varying degree of reflections.

To finish, select with the magic wand the outside of the larger circle. Keep the selection active and create a new layer and fill the selection with white.

A final burning in of the mid-tones around the edge of the eye should create a further illusion of a bulge in the eye.

Update

I made the iris outer glow a bit brighter. Added another outer ring underneath the existing one with a thicker and heavily feathered dark green. Then on the “iris rays” layer, i used the smudge tool to create the dividing line between the green glow and the outer colours. I added a more convincing highlight!!

If you would like to download an action that automates most of this then you can get it here.