YURI AKUNEY | at Imagine Summer, 23 August 2007
The Art of Photo Restoration
Sometimes, a small faded photo is
the only material reminder of people
or events long gone but still important
to us. Photo restoration, one
form of photo retouching, is the art
of reviving an image some would
consider irreparable. Photos that bear
just a pale resemblance of the face can
be restored to a decent portrait and a
photo torn apart can be put back together
through the process.
Though photo retouching has existed
as long as photography itself,
the introduction of digital image
processing has revolutionized photo
restoration. The variety of tools and
possibilities offered by image editing
programs (Adobe Photoshop is the
best known one) can be overwhelming.
They open a lot of creative possibilities,
but the learning curve to
master them can be very steep.
Pre-computer, traditional photo
restoration required not just an artistic
eye but also the ability to work
with inverse colours as the original
photo was photographed on a reasonably
large negative and then the
emulsion was scratched in the spots
that needed to be darker and the spots
that needed to be lighter were painted
over with non-transparent paint using
sharply pointed brushes or an airbrush.
Precise adding or removing of
objects from the photo required
hours of masking and multiple darkroom
exposures.
The digital photo restoration process
starts with high quality scanning
of the original image and improving
the general contrast of the photo.
Most faded photos still contain the
original image in all details but the
tonal range is compressed the difference
between most dark and most
light tones becomes very narrow.
Professional scanners register very
subtle differences in light tones and
that makes it possible to stretch the
captured range up to several times in
Photoshop, restoring the original
contrast of the photograph.
Because of this stretching, all tiny
scratches, dust spots and the paper
texture become more pronounced.
Then comes a stage of time consuming
and painstaking cleaning of the
image by cloning neighbouring areas
to hide the imperfections.
The next step usually involves reconstruction
of missing or badly
damaged parts of the photo using existing
ones that can be cloned and
modified. For example, dress buttons,
carpet patterns or furniture detail.
Photoshop has really flexible
tools that help to distort the cloned
piece geometrically and tonally to fit
perfectly the area surrounding the
missing part. In this way it is possible
to replace people's eyes, ears, limbs,
etc if the part from the other side of
the body wasn't damaged as most
of us are almost symmetrical.
The final step is to reconstruct
damaged pieces that can't be cloned
from the original photo. That is
where creativity and the imagination
of the restorer comes into play.
Sometimes you can be lucky and have
a different photo of the person or the
object to reconstruct and use them to
clone and modify. Sometimes you
have to come up with something that
is similar to the object and use retouching
skills to make it look natural
in the photo. For example, to reconstruct
the missing palm of my distant
relative in our old family photo,
I had to photograph my own hand
from the same angle and then use
image aging and thorough blending
to match the original photo.
The main challenge of photo restoration
is to preserve the look and
feeling of an old photo. The art of retouching
is in making all the changes
and additions look as natural as possible,
and indistinguishable from the
original. No Photoshop tool can do
it automatically, so a near-perfect eye
for detail, a feel for image relevancy
and a good knowledge of software
tools are indispensable for anyone
who is going to try photo restoration
themselves.
Yuri Akuney was born in Lviv,
Ukraine, in 1961, trained as an electronics
engineer and worked as a microcomputer
devices designer for
over 10 years. Always fascinated with
the power of digital image processing,
he started to explore it in 1999.
After immigrating to Canada in 2001,
he started a company named Digital
Imaging Plus, and worked with museums
and galleries on image restoration
and preservation projects, and
helping artists to photograph and
document their artwork. For information
about his work, see his
website at digitalperfections.ca
Copyright © 2007 Yuri Akuney. All rights reserved.
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