My mum was asked to restore about 10 old photos (taken around 1955-1965). She has scanned the worst one and I have had a play with it. In my opinion there is not a lot that can be done to salvage this one. I have used levels, shadow/highlight, and contrast.
The uniforms are obviously blown, and there's not much you can do about that, but it makes me wonder - are they 'blown' in the original exposure? Film is much more forgiving than digital, there may be some detail remaining in the uniforms that got lost in scanning. I'd see if you can get another scan that's significantly underexposed and see if you can extract some information from those areas; maybe combine with the faces in this version, which look pretty good?
These photos were scanned from the originals. There are no negatives. When you say scan underexposed do you mean off the original photo or the negative?
I simply mean that there may be detail in the uniforms in the original print that aren't showing in the scan, due to the quantized nature of digital imagery. So just as overexposing a photo leads to blowouts, overexposing a scan can, too...
So I mean place the original print on the scanner, but set it to underexpose to see if you can extract anything from those areas.
Re-scanning the original photo might work. Look closely at the pic and see if there appears to be more detail in the uniforms than is showing up in the scan. If so, try playing with your scanner settings until the detail shows up better and gives you something to work with. Good luck.
What's to restore? The image looks fine and, while blown out, the faces are properly exposed. Additionally, there doesn't seem to be adverse aging effects. What were you/the client hoping to get out of this?
About the only way you will ever get detail back out of those uniforms is to use the brush tool in multiply mode. Using an eye dropper in the color palette shows them to be about 95% all 255's which is no data - pure white.
What's to restore? The image looks fine and, while blown out, the faces are properly exposed. Additionally, there doesn't seem to be adverse aging effects. What were you/the client hoping to get out of this?
There is going to be a reunion and they want to display the photos, and obviously they want the photos to look their best.
The names of the people in the photo as well as the date/year they were taken will also be on the photo. People at the reunion will then have the opportunity to purchase a copy. Thus the need to restore them to as good as possible. You mentioned the image looks fine, which one, the original or my attempt?
Did a quick attempt to see what could be / couldn't be done with it:
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Only so much that can be realistically be done with it.
Perhaps a better scan might help?
Much of the clean up work is manual soft brush cloning and manual blur tool.
Yeah, but it's a pretty old picture and I bet they wouldn't remember what they were wearing. ...although, it's more likely they will be dressed like that at the reunion, I suppose. ;-)
Yep that's funny!!!! I think I will email that to my mum and ask her what she thinks about the restoration job. I can just imagine the look on her face as it is down loading. Shes on dialup to so its going to take a while to unload. TOO FUNNY!!
