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Posted on 12/02/21 3:56:29 PM
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop
Posts: 4902

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Need Help With Photo Restoring
I have been trying to source old photographs of my mother when she was a professional photographer in the 1930's. The only thing I have been able to find is some old 8mm movie in which there is one shot of her with her Rolleiflex.

Here is a frame extracted from this. Any suggestions how I set about restoring this? It's an area of Photoshop I don't know beyond the obvious dust and scratch cleanups. Obviously I can experiment with some pretty intelligent guessing but I believe there are some quite specialised techniques for this. Any of you done this? If it helps I am quite happy for it to be monochrome.





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Posted on 14/02/21 1:26:25 PM
GKB
Magical Montagist
Posts: 3703

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Re: Need Help With Photo Restoring
Hi David

I have played around with this image but I'm afraid that I cannot realistically get much better than this original.

The main problems are the colour cast, the backlight blowing out the sky and much of the rest of the image leaving no detail to enhance, it's out of focus and the resolution, coming from a 8mm cine frame is not the best. As soon as I tried to do anything with it i could see 'blockiness' appearing.

You can improve on things slightly, though. Try a levels adjustment by moving the black point to just past the point where the graph starts to rise. Also push up the saturation slightly.

A black and white conversion of the adjusted image doesn't look too bad.

Also put a copy of the image at the top of the layer stack and Filter>Other>High Pass. Give it a VERY low radius (I used 1.5%) and change the blend mode to hard light. This will add a little bit of sharpness to the image but perhaps not in the way that you might like as you are basically sharpening all the grotty bits. Yo might be able to mask out some of this layer to keave just your mum.

'Fraid there's not a lot that I can do with this image as it stands.

i think this cartoon describes the problem:-





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Posted on 14/02/21 5:04:47 PM
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop
Posts: 4902

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Re: Need Help With Photo Restoring
Thanks Gordon. You have more or less underlined my own problems. Square blockiness appears very quickly once you increase contrast or sharpen. I can get rid of the colour cast and hand paint out the dark lines around the highlights and that's about it.

I've lived through a few movie versions of that cartoon. Do you really need all those lights? "Can't you just 'do it' in post?" .....................

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The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it .......

Posted on 14/02/21 6:40:26 PM
GKB
Magical Montagist
Posts: 3703

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Re: Need Help With Photo Restoring
DavidMac wrote:

I've lived through a few movie versions of that cartoon. Do you really need all those lights? "Can't you just 'do it' in post?" .....................


Get it as near right in camera and only then bring it into your software of choice.

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Posted on 14/02/21 7:34:58 PM
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop
Posts: 4902

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Re: Need Help With Photo Restoring
GKB wrote:
DavidMac wrote:

I've lived through a few movie versions of that cartoon. Do you really need all those lights? "Can't you just 'do it' in post?" .....................


Get it as near right in camera and only then bring it into your software of choice.


Of course! Trying to convince producers of that is not always easy ...........

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The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it .......

Posted on 22/02/21 10:18:07 PM
vibeke
Kreative Kiwi
Posts: 2152

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Re: Need Help With Photo Restoring
GKB wrote:




Love that cartoon

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Posted on 24/02/21 12:46:14 PM
lwc
Hole in One
Posts: 2615

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Re: Need Help With Photo Restoring
GKB wrote:

i think this cartoon describes the problem:-








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