Photo Restore Project - Tina

Glass, Moisture, and Air - 3 enemies of great framed photos.

What you see here is a photograph of a friend, Tina.  It is of her and her father dancing when she was a little one.  This is a perfect example why I love photos...they are 2-dimensional memories that we can keep forever.  Memories fade in our minds, but they can "rekindled" with a good photo.

BUT, time (mixed with moisture, glass, and air) can do unfortunate things.  If you click and see, the photo is actually partially adherent to the glass...moisture has found its way into the frame.  Because of this, you can not remove the photo from the frame.  Doing so would tear the photo and ruin it.

SO, if you can't take it out and scan it (which would be the best way to do it), then work around it.

Nikon D700, fitted with a 24-70mm @ 70mm, F5.6 at 1/250th second,@ 250 ISO

Notes: F 5.6 is a good aperture to shoot from.  I did do an exposure at F8, which didn't look near as good.  I used the lowest possible ISO, in order to make a "clean" exposure, as I was going to do photo restoration, and hence a lot of noise would not help.

Step 1:  Take the photo into a well lit place (sun light is easiest to correct for)

Step 2:  Clean off the glass to avoid unneeded dirt (if you can't take it out of the frame - if you can, just scan the photo on a flatbed)

Step 3:  Shoot at a slight angle (no too much to avoid distortion) to help minimize reflections .

Note:  If you have a circular polarizer, this further cuts down on reflections...for this lens, I did not have one.

Step 4:  It is best to meter from the image on the plane of the photo, but you don't HAVE to do it.  For this image, I used a hand-held meter, and adjusted it to get the settings I wanted

Step 5: Best to use a tripod to shoot from - however, mine was messing up, so I had to do this hand-holding. Due to this, I wanted a fast shutter speed, in order to minimize motion artifact.

Now, step in a little bit of patience and Photoshop CS5 magic.  I am extremely proud of how this photo restore came out - I took a photo that was about 4x4, and I was able to restore it enough to get a 8x10 out of it..and more importantly, she has an extra copy that she can keep forever  :)

I blogged a different photo I restored quite a while back - please feel free to check this out


Note:  The above images have been watermarked NOT because I hold ANY copyright to the photos, but I watermarked them to minimize the chance that these photos are used in any other way then for illustrative purposes on this blog


-JM