Whenever I find old photographs of family members, I try to get those into my Lightroom database.  (Of course, this also works in Aperture, Bridge, or any other database program you may use.)  You don’t want to lose these old photos of your heritage, so bring them into your files and back them up the same as your current photostream.  You can find more about entering your ancestors’ information in a blog I wrote back in 2010 (here).

I know I’m using a pretty broad definition of people photography by including these old folks, and you and I didn’t take these photos.  However, I feel strongly that you should save your old photos.  Too many cherished memories just gather dust until they get tossed out in the next spring cleaning.

These old gems are a good place to begin learning how to  restore photos.  Black and white photos relieve you of the burden of color restoration at the same time you’re trying to learn to repair tears and folds.  You can remove stains and color shifts by removing all the colors.  After you have made the restorations, you can add in a sepia or selenium tone to the repaired photo.  Mark gave you a good demonstration of some restoration work back at the beginning of our blog (here).

Let me close out by entreating you to find and save these old photographs.   The files won’t take up too much space on your drives, and, once you’ve brought them back to life, everyone will want a copy.  They are part of the world of people photography, and they are fun to fix up.

There are places to volunteer to shoot portraits of military families to send to their loved ones deployed overseas.

http://www.pmdaportraitsoflove.com/families.php

Each year thousands of animals are dumped off at shelters and, if no homes are found, are euthanized.  Many animal shelters have been hit hard by the economy and are struggling to get by.  The photos they post of their guests are grainy and unlikely to draw in a new owner.  There are now shelters getting photographers to donate their time and produce studio portraits of the animals allowing them to be adopted more quickly. 

http://animaltracks.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/30/10271873-professional-portraits-reveal-shelter-animals-true-selves#

My own personal project has been Operation Photo Rescue. http://www.operationphotorescue.org/

This non-profit group goes in where disasters have struck to try and salvage the damaged pictures.  Few of these images are great photographs, but each of them is a precious memory.  I really enjoy restoring old pictures.  It is time consuming and challenging trying to undo the ravages of water, mold, scratches, etc.  As a volunteer, you download scanned images and do your best.  The restored photos are then uploaded back to the website, printed, and returned to their owners.  http://www.operationphotorescue.org/forum/gallery/888_06_05_08_8_20_18.jpg

Last year I didn’t get to help much, but this year I will do better. Get out and give back.

Start the repair with a high quality scan.  You want to scan your images at a high resolution and save the scan as a TIF file to give yourself lots of pixels to bend to your will as you go about fixing these things.  Here is a sample of a simple portrait with a scratch problem.

When you are surveying your photo for scratches inside Photoshop, you should do it methodically, starting at the top left corner, at 200-300% zoom, and moving down the image.  This can be tedious work and, if your workflow is interrupted, you want to know where you left your repair.   These scratches are relatively easy to fix.  They’re small and aren’t destroying any major portions of the image.  I take these into Photoshop and fix these flaws before I do any other work that may be necessary, like color fading.  There are several helpful tools in Photoshop, and you should try all of them, since different flaws may require different tools.  The ones I use most often are the Healing Brush Tool, Spot Healing Brush Tool, and Clone Stamp Tool.    

I find the best method is to create a blank layer and make my changes there.  If you make mistakes on the new layer, you have not harmed the original scan.  You should also ensure that you keep the original scan even after you’ve made the corrections.  As programs improve their tools, you may be able to rework some of your corrections.  The Content Aware feature in Photoshop CS5 has made a huge contribution to fixing scratches.  Without too much effort, you can repair the image.

One of the more complex scratch problems you’ll find on old negatives is film reticulation.  We used to cause reticulation purposely as a special effect in the old film days.  The uniform fractures made for an interesting effect.  The problem here is with regular negatives that have aged in storage conditions that varied in temperature and humidity.   This reticulation occurs when the old film is starting to deteriorate and micro-cracks appear on the film.  It looks like this.

When you see this, you know you’re in for a long repair session.  These will be hard to see if you don’t zoom in, but will show up in your prints.  You use the same techniques to fix these flaws, but the reticulation usually occurs throughout the entire negative.  This is no time to do an incomplete job – take your time and move through the image.

This might not be the most fun you’ll ever have in photography, but saving old photographs for your family and clients has its own rewards.

The clone stamp tool lets you select something from within your image and paste a duplicate copy of that area over another part of the image.  When you move your brush, the selected area moves in parallel, and whatever is there will be pasted into your picture.  Without some care you can get eyeballs onto walls, and all sorts of unintended results.

As with most tools in Photoshop you can select the brush size and how soft the edges are from the brush panel at the top.

Keeping the edges soft and the brush size as close to what your target area is, helps hide the effect.  That of course is the idea, you don’t want people to even know that you’ve been there.

Next on the menu bar is the blend Mode box.  These need a tutorial all of their own, but provide a largely untapped level of control. You can choose to only impact dark colors or light colors, for now, you can leave it in Normal mode for most applications.

Opacity allows you to build up layers of sampling, you can hover over the word Opacity and the “scrubby sliders” will appear, all you have to do is drag your cursor left or right to decrease/increase how much transparency you want.  Of course you can type in 50% or 20% or whatever you chose.

I’m not going to touch Flow, as I’ve never adjusted it in all my jobs.  I’m going to skip on over to the layer selection.  Sample:, helps protect your original image.  To me it is important never to damage the original picture, so everything I do is done on its own separate layer.  That way I retain complete control and can go back, even months later if I want to adjust something.  You can sample from the current layer, the ones below, or from all layers.

Remember our groom?  His suit definitely had some issues.

Both his dark suit and white shirt needed repair.  Here is what those repairs look like on their own layer.  They are built up with different levels of opacity and re-sampled frequently to avoid being obvious.

When combined together, well if you look closely enough you can tell, but…

There are tricks to working along the edges and in transition areas, but we will save those for later.

If you really want to know how lots more detail about how it is done, read Katrin Eismann’s wonderful book Photoshop ® Restoration and Retouching.

Here is the original as scanned with my high resolution scanner.  You might notice a few “issues”.  Faded yellow, cracked, stained and oh, yeah missing a top right corner which cuts a lady’s face in two.

The first challenge is picking a place to start.  Although I didn’t know it at the time, I should have immediately restored the whites to white and the blacks to black.  I did it later and it worked out, but that wasn’t smart.  I divided the picture into large areas; the groom, the bride, the background, and the big tear.  Both the bride and groom were further divided into clothing, hands, face and hair, while I took the background into regions.  As I worked on each of these, I did so on separate individual layers.  That way when I messed up, and I did, I could a. not ruin the entire picture, and b. see and correct small manageable chunks.  In Photoshop, you can also adjust the opacity of each layer separately, which is nice.

So I looked at the picture and chose to work on the groom’s suit.  Broad surfaces, not overly detailed.  In restoration, the clone stamp tool, the healing brush and layer masks are your standard weapons.  In follow on blogs, we will drill down into the right ways and point out some “less right”—ok, wrong ways these can be used.  Carefully masking out his outline, in order to prevent spill over, I reached the first signs of progress. 

I wasn’t ready to tackle the detail in the bride’s dress or hair yet, so I fixed the background.  Matching random wall paper is harder than it looks, as is making the details in columns, lights and mirrors look “natural”.

After a few weeks, I felt my technique had improved enough to be ready to take on repairing the bride.

I left the missing corner for last as I had to decide what to do about the half a person in the picture.  I finally made the hard decision that I didn’t have enough information to try and create all her missing features, so she disappeared into the wall paper.  This is where the details become important and where the human eye can reveal more.  We notice shadows, when they are out of place.  So I had to create a suitable shadow of the bride on the now restored wall. The ability to use that layer opacity was very important here.

Finally, using curves and levels I fixed the overall tone of the picture and slapped on a new white border.

It took quite a while, but that was because I was learning as I went along.  It gets faster and is worth the effort.