MEDIO FILTRANTE

Most of the work I do to restore photographs falls into one of the following fi ve categories: ● _{Restoring tone} ● _{Restoring color}

● _{Fine-detail repairs and cleanup}

● _{Major damage repairs}

● _{Repairing uneven damage}

Restoring Tone

Photographs in need of restoration usually don’t have very good tonality. Fading and staining will wash out blacks and make whites dingy and dark. A severely faded photograph will have a very narrow tonal range. A big part of restoration is expanding that compressed set of tones back to its original natural brilliance. You can accomplish a lot simply by making a good scan of the photograph, and I’ve devoted Chapter 4, “ Getting the Photo into the Computer, ” to that subject. As you’ll discover, the process requires some care and attention to detail, but it’s a pretty cut-and-dried one.

Beyond merely getting an acceptable tonal range from black to white, one must refi ne the tonal placement within the photograph so that the highlights

have their sparkle, shadow detail is brought out, and overall the print conveys the feeling of a fresh, new photograph. This is where the art and your talent and skill come in. The Curves tools in your software program are powerful tools for achieving great tonality, and once you master them you’ll use them a lot. They’re not the only tricks in the bag, though. The Shadow/Highlight adjustment in Photoshop and dodging and burn-in adjustment layers (see Chapter 5,

“ Restoring Tone ” ) go way beyond simple Curves in their power. In addition, there are some third-party plug-ins (Chapter 3) and specialized techniques (Chapter 10) that go further still in letting you control tone and color rendition. Restoring Color

Both B & W and color photographs need their color restored. Some B & W photographs will come to you with a pristine, neutral image, but in most of them, what was originally black and white may now be brown and white, brown and yellow, or even dark brown and not-so-dark brown. Part of the restoration job is getting that photograph back to its original hue. Not all photographs started out as true B & W; many of them were sepia or brown in color. Still, it’s a pretty safe bet that the deteriorated photo doesn’t have the color it did originally.

Color photographs (prints, slides, and negatives) almost always need color restoration. That’s by far the most common reason someone will ask to have a color photograph restored. Only occasionally does one turn up where the color is just fi ne and there’s just physical damage.

Just as with B & W photos, a good scan helps a lot; it’s a necessary prerequisite to doing good color restoration. Occasionally a scan will accomplish most of the color restoration all by itself, as Figure 1-1 illustrates (I demonstrate this in the online examples at http://photo-repair.com/dr1.htm). Most of the time, unfortunately, a good scan will provide the raw data I need but no more than that.

Curves are my constant companion, just as they are for restoring tones, but they’re by no means the only tools I depend on for restoring color. Hue and saturation controls are very important; I also make heavy use of specialized plug-ins such as Digital ROC.

Fine-Detail Repairs and Cleanup

Old photos invariably need to be cleaned up. They will be dirty and scratched and have fi ne cracks or crazed surfaces or annoying textures. Every photo you restore will have one or more of these defects to some degree.

This kind of fi ne-structure repair often consumes the majority of the time I spend on a restoration. Much like picking up litter, it’s not intellectually or artistically stimulating, and it’s tedious to do, but the landscape looks a lot nicer

when I’m done. My way of dealing with this task is to put on some music so I don’t get too bored by the repetitive activity and so I can relax and go at it.

I cover many tools in Chapter 8, “ Damage Control, ” that make this work go faster. The right fi lters and plug-ins attack the noise and “ litter ” more than the photographic image I’m trying to recover. I have a collection of masking tricks that select for the garbage, so I can work on it more aggressively (and quickly) without messing up the rest of the photograph. All these tools aid the repair efforts, but they’re not a replacement for close-in, pixel-by-pixel adjustments. They just make my efforts much more effi cient.

Cleanup work is often highly repetitive. For that reason I try not to dwell on it; it’s suffi cient to tell you, “ I painted over the scratches with such-and-such a fi lter with these settings. ” That tells you everything you need to know about how I did that bit of repair work. This glosses over the extremely important fact that executing that one cleanup step may have taken more time than all the other stages of the restoration.

Major Damage Repairs

Now I’m talking about the big stuff like tears, missing emulsion, and photos that are in pieces. These types of repairs require very different tools and approaches than the fi ne-structure cleanup I just talked about. The damaged or obliterated areas are going to be larger than much of the fi ne detail in the photograph, so I cannot use mechanical fi ll-in and erasure tools.

Repairing these problems always requires some degree of recreation of detail. Sometimes it’s as easy as cloning in material from the surrounding area, as in Figure 1-3 . Automated patching tools such as Image Doctor or healing brushes in Photoshop are a big help to me. Often, though, these repairs require serious retouching and illustration creation skills. I’ll be honest and admit that major retouching of this type is what I’m worst at. That’s a big reason why I recommend Katrin Eismann’s book, Photoshop Restoration & Retouching , because she is so good at doing that.

Repairing Uneven Damage

I use the same tools for fi xing streaks and stains in a print or tarnished and bleached spots that I use for correcting tone and color overall. The difference is that I have to fi x those areas of the photograph separately from the rest. One way to do that is with history brushes or cloning between versions, to paint in the corrections just where I want them. A more powerful way to do it, when I can, is to create a special selection or mask that contains only the differently damaged areas.

You ’ll fi nd that masking crops up a lot in my solutions to restoration problems. That’s why I give over all of Chapter 7 to masking techniques. Masking doesn’t

let you do much that you couldn’t do by hand, but a good mask can save you most of that handwork by automatically placing the corrections where you want them and preventing them from leaking over into other parts of the photograph. Masks are also key to effectively combining layers, both image and adjustment, with the original photograph.