Restoring Historical Photographs

Anyone who has done even the smallest amount of family history research has turned up old photos. Many times we look at them with a mixture of the pleasure of discovery, and dismay. The years (and the photo's owners) have not always been kind to those old images.
So here are some tips for restoring or repairing your old and historic photos.

Physical v. Digital Photo Repair
Thankfully, most of the old techniques for physical repair of photographs and negatives are dying out. For the amateur, physical repair often meant Scotch tape or correction fluid (see above). For the pro, it meant brushes and pigments, airbrushing, or chemical reprocessing (using bleach then B&W photo developer).

Trouble was, each of these techniques ran the risk of harming the original image. But now, with various photo editing programs, you can get a better result than ever before using digital tools.

If ever you have particularly grit-infested negatives or slides, you may be tempted to rewash them (they were washed in water originally). RESIST! Old film can become unstable and using water can lead to unpredictable and disastrous results.

Capture
So, for modern photo restoration, it's the digital way or the highway.

Now, to get the image into the computer so you can repair it, you are going to have to either scan it or photograph it with a digital camera. Both work well in my experience.

If your image is from a book, newspaper or a magazine, it was probably printed in "halftone" (tiny dots). In this case, best to scan, with the "descreening" button checked. And always scan at high resolutions.

When doing photo restoration, I scan most images at around 600 dpi and I scan small negatives and small images (e.g. passport photos) at 1200 or 2400 dpi.

Some quick fixes
Over here at Your Story Here we have been doing photo restoration for years. And we have learned a trick or two in that time. For instance, most photos can be restored using just 3 or 4 simple adjustments.

Straighten: Try to line up the image's horizon (or the ground) with the horizontal edges of the picture frame.

Crop: Take out any distracting detail, like irrelevant or cut-off people, or too much sky.

Contrast: Hit the auto contrast button and see what you think. (Most images look best if they have the whole tonal range - white through black. "Auto contrast" buttons force your darkest tone to black and your lightest to white.) If you're not happy, you may be able to adjust the mid-tones to get it right.

Color tone: Color can often be restored with a simple "auto color" adjustment - you can get especially good results with those faded, magenta-hued shots from the 1960s. Failing that, you will have to use the various "color balance" or "channel mixer" controls.

Dust and scratches
I never met an old photo that didn't have dust and scratches.

For this bit of photo restoration work, you are going to need Photoshop (if you don't have it, they often give away Photoshop "Elements" with a new printer - so check the disks that came with your last printer). The first step is to pull up the Filter > Noise > Dust and Scratches tool. This tool does an almost magical job of restoring a photo by eliminating tiny dust spots, but it does have the side effect of softening the whole image, so use it sparingly (try radius 1, threshold 4).

It's a good idea to use a layer mask to limit the impact of the "dust and scratches" filter to less important areas like clothes, the sky, background etc., leaving the face alone. (The "dust and scratches" filter often has the unintended consequence of taking the glint from people's eyes!)

If the job is too big for this fix, you are going to need the "cloning" tool or the "spot healing brush".

Some special photo repair problems
Silvering: You sometimes see deterioration of the silver halides in shadows and dark areas. These areas of efflorescence cause shiny spots that catch the light of the scanner - like you can see in this old death portrait.

The photo restoration trick here is to simply de-saturate the image, then recolor it on another layer with a (sepia) tone similar to the original and blend with the composite mode set to "color".

Torn photos and missing features: Photos with damage to parts such as eyes (see example above) need major surgery. Here you need to search for "spare parts". Damage to one side of a person can often be repaired by cutting, flipping and pasting a portion of the person's other side - this often works for eyes in particular. If that won't work, look for another photo of the person around the same age and use parts from that!

Know your limits
There are some intractable problems in photo restoration and photo repair. Poor focus at the time the photo was taken just cannot be fixed. Second, the imprint of heavily patterned paper is almost impossible to remove (although there are a few pro tricks that mitigate the effect); and chemical or food stains can be very time consuming.

But for the majority of run of the mill issues with restoring old photos, these can all be solved and the old folks who appear in them made to look almost young again!

Postscript: For the more adventurous, you may want to try out the free, open-source alternative to industry standard Photoshop: Photo Repair & Photo Restoration with GIMP


Jane Lehmann-Shafron is a video biographer who co-founded Your Story Here LLC Personal Documentary, a video production company that specializes in preserving family history. Based in Orange County CA, she was recently featured in national women's magazine "Woman's World" and her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.