Photographic images

Imagine one evening while you try to put order in the old attic, amidst the dark and the dust gathered by the years, you discover an old photo album, last century’s early version of a home multimedia database…A photo album, containing mostly black & white photos of family elders -occasions like weddings, gatherings, celebrations, trips around the world, full on sentimental value, and even – why not – historical value. After all, at day end, everyone’s own history is a part of the world’s history – seeing it from a philosophical point of view.

But unfortunately -as it happens with old technology storage media – time leaves its trace on the photos. For instance visible marks on the surface, dust and scratches and discolouring and fading are constantly populating the surface of each of your valuable photos: humid, photo-hungry germs are feeding their appetite starting from each photos edges, slowly but steadily progressing towards an irreversible victory, turning history into oblivion.

Unless… Oh, yes, using magic technology, a perceptive eye and a steady hand can reinstate the photo-historical status-quo, eliminate or correct any side-effects, any signs or scars this battle of time has left-over. And the good thing is that there is no need for expensive technology, nor rocket science is needed: Any good old image editing application with a scanner will do – and in case you feel nostalgic about old storage media types, a printer with photo paper will complement the task. So let’s say, you have the photos, you have the technology… What next? How do you proceed, quickly and efficiently enough to restore any kind of printed images? Are there some tricks you should have in mind, which can help towards this goal?

Well, the answer is yes and no. Despite the power tools we have these days even in our home computers (with Adobe Photoshop on Windows and Mac, as well as Gimp on Linux as primary examples) capable of easily performing a huge number of impressive digital photo tasks, restoration of old photos is still closely related to a users aptitude and artistic eye, as much as in his good knowledge and effective use of the application tools.

For example, in Photoshop there are embedded filters, which automatically remove small dust and scratches: some clever image recognition algorithm works there, that recognises unwanted elements by identifying irregular fluctuations in the bitmap’s pixel colour depth mapping. But this works only relatively well, as the underlying algorithm is not lossless: the more strongly the filter is applied, the more the loss of the image quality in terms of sharpness and details. Furthermore, it is strongly dependent on the image contents. Dust, scratches and other elements are more easily removed from the photo’s uniform shaded areas, i.e. when photos are picturing elements like walls, surfaces, sky, clouds etc. than from, say, a landscape with lots of details, a patterned canvas or a photos that contains a number of people.

As for the use of tools like the powerful Adobe Photoshop’s Clone Stamp, or the newer Spot Healing Brush, which allows sampling and copying to pixel level, when it comes to heavy damaged images, the user’s intuition is the only serious tool to consider. For example, it could be the case that an image is so much damaged, that parts of it are literally missing – ok, if it is a landscape with flowers, sampling will work well, but when the damaged part contains elements of a particular form, like peoples faces or other body parts, interior design or architectural elements, then copying, sampling and spot healing is not enough. Sometimes the user would have to re-create these elements; identifying and copying similar details from somewhere else in the picture could be also possible, but most of the times angles and light shades would be different. And especially when the damaged areas are affecting elements like peoples faces, hands, animals etc. or even everyday objects like chairs, or clothes with special details like shoes etc., the restoring task is even more difficult: these objects that would need recreation, have aesthetics that are well integrated within our visual perception of ‘how things should look like’.

When the desired result is an image aesthetically correct and therefore usable in many ways, there is no magical recipe into which tools in what order and what functions the restorer should apply when working on the task. More so when the task is to put colour in black and white photos, especially with people on them which involves large areas of skin. A correct skin colour is something that all professional photographers and image editors are looking for, especially when images are going to be printed. Putting colour in a black & white image is one of the most difficult tasks a digital image restorer will have to perform. Imagination and creative intuition as well as experience and advanced knowledge of the tools available are strongly required in order to achieve sometimes a just-bearable result. As there is a very fine step easy to be crossed before a beautiful face pictured in black & white is turned to a pink, red or yellow dull alien one, such is the fine line that can differentiate a good photo restoration from inadequate attempts sold as expertise.

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