Photo Restoration & Training

Picture Restoration

Restoring your treasured photographs is a way to preserve and protect them. Digital images can be posted to web sites, shared through email, and printed and displayed.

You'll need an image editor (or software that inclues image editing tools) like Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Fireworks, or JASC Paint Shop Pro. Although the techniques listed here can be achieved with any of these programs, references to specific features or tools are for Fireworks MX 2004.

Why Digitize?

The best reason to create digital versions of your cherished images is to protect the original pictures from further deterioration. In addition, you can make (and disseminate) as many copies of the photo (in varying sizes) as you want.

What Causes Deterioration?

Photographs deteriorate due to age, handling, and exposure to environmental factors like light, humidity, and heat. Tip: It's best to store photos in a dark, dry, cool environment.

Scanning

Of course, you'll need to scan your photographs in order to convert them into digital images (unless the photos are provided on disc or sent to you as an email attachment). Here are a few simple guidelines for scanning.

Calibrate your scanner. Each of the popular software photo editing packages comes with a calibration sheet that you can use to adjust your computer for optimal results.

Use your image editor (software) instead of the software that came bundled with your scanner to edit your photos. Your graphics software has more features and was designed specifically for the job.

Resolution

Scan your photos at (at least) 300 dpi (dots per inch). If you intend to enlarge your photos (scale them from 4x6 to 8x10, for example), scan them at 600dpi. The higher resolution makes a much larger file, but it gives the software more information to work with as it "fills in" the data during enlargement. Even if the final image is intended for a web page, you'll want the higher resolution to make editing the image easier. (The software will have more data to work with.) If you plan to print the photo in its original size, 300dpi is sufficient.

Color vs. Black & White

Scan your photos in color even if the source image is black & white. The additional information will give you more options (some software packages disable many features by design when you load (open) a black & white image), and you can always convert the photo from color to black & white if you need to.

After scanning, store the original file on a brand-name CD or DVD. Then create a copy on your hard drive. Work on the "copy" in case you make a mistake or encounter a computer glitch (like a power outage or disc/software error).

Editing the Image

Open your COPY of the image in your image editing software. (Remember to store the original on a brand-name CD or DVD, if possible; otherwise, store it in a folder on your hard drive.)

Next, crop your photo, removing any extra white space picked up from the scanner bed during the scan. Why? Because the next step in editing the photo is determining/setting the proper tonal values of the (pixels that comprise the) image. To do this, the image editing software analyzes all of the digital information in the picture, including the white or grey areas around the picture, and uses all of that data to determine the overall tonal balance of the image. If your scanned image includes extra white space, the calculation will be incorrect (as compared to the cropped version of the photo). To eliminate the extra white/grey space, crop your picture to a reasonable facsimile of the "final" version of the picture, in terms of content.

Cropping an Image

To crop a photo, do the following:

Choose the Crop tool from the Tools panel or choose Edit > Crop Document.
Click and hold the mouse button and drag a bounding box on the workspace. Use the handle icons to adjust the crop area until the bounding box surrounds just the area of the document that you want to keep.
Double-click inside the bounding box or press Enter to crop the document.

Next, adjust the tonal range of the image. A bitmap with a full tonal range should have an even number of pixels in all areas. The Levels feature corrects bitmaps with a high concentration of pixels in the highlights, midtones, or shadows.

Highlights corrects an excess of light pixels, which makes the image look washed out.

Midtones corrects an excess of pixels in the midtones, which makes the image bland.

Shadows corrects an excess of dark pixels, which hides much of the detail.

The Levels feature sets the darkest pixels as black and the lightest pixels as white, then redistributes the midtones proportionally. This produces an image with the sharpest detail in all of its pixels.

Each of the popular image editors offers this feature. You can use the Automatic level feature or adjust the levels manually, by setting the

To set levels manually, all you need to do is grab whichever adjustment pointers are beyond the endpoints of the histogram curve and move them to those endpoints. The mid-pointer will automatically readjust to the exact center of the new endpoints, unless you move it separately. In most programs, you will be seeing a preview of what is happening to your image as you adjust, allowing you to work by eye as well as by the curve analysis. Play around with the pointers and see how the image is affected.

For images containing white, adjusting the Master (RGB in the the Channel pull-down menu above) is sometimes sufficient. Many old photographs do not contain any white, having faded or yellowed over time. This an issue because the histogram will treat the brightest point in any image as white, even if it is not actually white. So, even if you ultimately decide to have your digital image appear similar in color to your original (somewhat yellow, say, or sepia-toned, or in any case without any actual white), you should first establish a true white anyway, and then colorize the image later. This will allow you set levels more effectively and produce a much higher quality image overall.

You can create white in one of two ways. For a two-toned image (i.e. not a color photo), convert the image to grayscale and then use the Master levels adjustment to fine-tune the image.

Note: If you convert an image to grayscale to establish a white levelbe sure to re-convert the image to RGB or CMYK if you intend to colorize it.

It is difficult to overstate the value of level correction in antique photo restoration. In just one click of an auto-level feature or with a few simple manual adjustments, you can restore decades of wear and tear. The downside to adjusting the tonal levels is that it invariably reveals hidden damage and deterioration, including spotting, cracks, and minute tears.

Tip: Adjust tonal levels before adjusting brightness and/or contrast. Adjusting tones recalibrates the digital information available; the brightness and contrast adjustments discard some of that information.