WPPI - Newsletter

April 2008 • Volume 32 – Number 4

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Bringing Old Photographs Back to Life

By Ctein

One of the things I like best about the new world of digital photography is the way it enhances the conventional photographic experience. Don't get me wrong; I'm still a film-oriented photographer. Even when I make the switch to digital cameras, I'll still have my huge body of film-based photographs. Absent the catastrophic loss of that collection, conventional photographs are never going to stop being part of my life.

It was inevitable that my three decades of interest in photo preservation and digital technology would merge in my career. Digital restoration is safer and faster than physical restoration because all the restorative work takes place in the computer. Most importantly, it's usually better.

At first I did restoration simply for my own enjoyment and then for the pleasure of resurrecting friends' cherished photographs; it engaged my artistic soul. Now it's become part of my business: Digital Photo Restoration by Ctein (photo-repair.com) does not just help pay the bills, it's also immense fun for me.

I can combine my decades of photographic printing skill and experience with high-tech tools to construct a new digital image that embodies the original quality and beauty of the photograph. It's genuine "information recovery," not "information fabrication." I bring old photographs back to life; I do not invent a new life for them.

Old doesn't necessarily mean ancient or even antique. Brooks V. Walker photographed this mid-1970s landscape (figure 1) on early Kodacolor II color negative film, a relatively unstable film. The original negative (top of figure) had faded severely--most of the yellow dye and easily half of the cyan were gone. The fading was also uneven across the negative. The negative had some light scratches, but no serious mechanical damage.

This negative was unprintable. The best possible darkroom print I could make (lower left) was still dark and low in contrast, and it suffered from extreme and uncorrectable color distortion, with purple shadows and green highlights.

This 35mm Kodacolor II negative is badly faded after 30 years of room-temperature storage. Conventional darkroom printing (lower left) cannot rescue it; there's too much loss of density and severe color crossover caused by differential fading of the dye layers. Digital restoration (lower right) produces an entirely satisfactory print from this "hopeless" negative.

What this negative needed was to have density and contrast restored to the cyan and yellow dye images so that they matched the magenta dye image. To deal with the uneven fading, I created two Curves adjustment layers, one to fix the cyan dye fading and the other to fix the yellow dye fading. I created Curves for those layers that corrected the most heavily faded parts of the negative. I used the shift-eyedropper tool in Photoshop to set several information points in the negative so that I could monitor how the highlights, shadows and midtones changed as I played with Curves.

These Curves layers overcorrected portions of the negative that were less faded. I fixed that by using the airbrush tool--set to black and 10 percent strength--to paint in masks in each of the adjustment layers to reduce their effect on the portions of the negative that didn't need as great a correction.

Once the image had an overall approximation of correct contrast and color, I made local-area adjustments to the Curve shapes, hue and saturation, in consultation with Brooks, to accurately restore the color and tonal values in the water and foliage. The final result is the photograph at the lower right.

Figure 2 shows an old family photo that is faded, stained and has chunks of emulsion entirely missing. But this isn't the serious problem: It's that the emulsion has shrunk and shattered over the entire print, covering it with an obscuring layer of fine cracks.

Fixing the tone and color was easy: First desaturate the image by 90 percent (to leave it with just a hint of antique-looking brown) and then use the Curves to restore the whites and blacks and adjust the middle tones for good rendition. The missing pieces of emulsion luckily fell in areas that were easy to fill in.

The original photograph is torn, stained and faded and has substantial emulsion damage. Fine cracks cover the entire surface, as you can see in the greatly enlarged section at the right. In the digitally restored photo you can see how the cracks are greatly diminished without compromising fine detail.

Dealing with that level of cracking took some ingenuity. Any blurring or smoothing filters applied to the entire image, no matter how adroitly, failed to substantially remove the cracks or they completely smeared out fine image detail. So I created a crack-selection mask by applying Photoshop's Find Edges filter, inverting and blurring the result, and saving it in a new channel. I created a duplicate layer of the original photo, applied that mask as a selection that picked out only the cracks and ran Photoshop's Median filter on it.

The Find Edges filter wasn't foolproof; in some places it had picked up real image detail instead of just cracks. Consequently, there were small, isolated regions where the Median filter had blurred out real detail. I eliminated those problems by using a small black airbrush to paint a mask into the Median-filtered layer that blocked the filter's impact at those edges. The result, while clearly imperfect when viewed at high magnification, looks flawless at normal close-viewing distances.

Ctein has been a writer and fine printmaker for 30 years and is one of the few remaining expert dye transfer printers. His books, Digital Restoration and Post Exposure, are available from Focal Press. Autographed copies may be purchased and his photographic work can be seen at http://ctein.com.

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