My Processes Explained (sort of)

In case anybody wonders what it is I do when I fiddle in Photoshop, with my ancient photos, here are a few examples of the challenges involved.

the easy stuff is just clearing away the extreme discoloration of so many old photos. When they were fresh and new, these photographs were black and white, not sepia. Time, air, moisture, and exposure to light will, in essence, tarnish the surface of the old photo, causing the colors to shift, and bleach away what remains. 

I've been going in and allowing P'shop to do the bulk of the color adjustment (the software is extremely user-friendly, that way), and then, after seeing what the Auto Contrast will do to it, I usually opt to go less extreme, opening up the "Shadows/Highlights" option in the "Adjust Lighting" set of enhancements. 

In a few of my past works, the fading has been severe enough that I've had to run it through the process a few times, in order to boost the shadows enough to see what's there. With these two fellows, twice was enough. Any more, and it ends up grainy and stark, like a really old newspaper photo instead of a studio portrait.

After that, it's a matter of rebuilding around blemishes and cracks in the photo.

This one still has a little bit of work left to go, but, as you can see, the bulk of the rebuilding is fairly fine-tuned work with both rubber stamp and airbrush tools, using varying degrees of opacity and varying widths of the tools, to make transitions look as natural as possible. 

In a few cases, there's really no rescuing large chunks of image… light leaks in the camera, errors in the darkroom – and even occasional coffee or ink spills – are frustrating for the photographer, and almost equally as aggravating to the digital restorer or comparable artists.  I did what I could with this one, by selecting the faintest section (the largest part of the lower half of the photo) and enhancing the contrast repeatedly, but, as you can see, there's little with which to work, even then – and what was there, was pretty badly distorted. Applying a small amount of airbrush and some rubber-stamp to smooth out the rough texture of the enhanced section helps a little, but…well… *sigh*.

That one looks like some positively superior 1960s chemical alteration is just kicking in… Might as well go back to the portraits for a while.