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.