About Photo restoration process

Photo is a wonderful memory of a moment by getting pleasure from and be cherished. Photos can make such magnificent gifts because they are especially personal. Photos help to remember beautiful moments of birth days, wedding days and on many occasional programs.

We need to restore photograph because photos can be damaged by sunlight exposure, temperature, handling, and the breakdown of the photographic paper (or material) used in the photograph and the developing process. Photo restoration existed long before the digital world. It was, and still is performed by skilled traditional photo specialists. They do retouching by hand with artist brushes and dyes, and they use enlargers for adding and subtracting exposure to prints, and filters for adjusting contrast. And today the good thing about photos is that it doesn’t matter how old they are as they can all be scanned and transformed digitally onto a computer. All of the restoration is then done on the digital copies, so once the photo has been scanned the original is no longer required.

The tools of the digital restorers include scanners, computers with high-end photo-editing software (ex. Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, Paint Shop Pro), high resolution monitors, and photo quality printers, paper and inks. They do retouching with a mouse or table pen, and save their work as electronic files that can be printed, emailed, or stored on removable media such as a CD-ROM or DVD. Many of the digital retouching features found in the high-end photo-editing software such as Un-sharp Mask, Dodging and Burning, and Contrast have their roots in the traditional, non-digital photo restoration world.
The following section shows some of the more common problems with photographs that can be corrected by Photo restoration .
7. Cracking- it can be removed by rebuilding parts; restoring black, white and gray levels; image sharpening repairing and cleaning up the background.
8. Extreme Fading- can be removed by restoring detail, adjusting brightness & contrast, adjusting tone, sharpening
9. Fading, Tone and Contrast- removed by brightness and contrast, sharpening the image, replacing the background
10. Color Fading and Shifting- it can be removed by adjusting colors for a more natural look, Sharpening, adjusting brightness and contrast
11. Exposure Problems- removed by correcting the tonal level (ex. highlights, shadows and mid-tones) sharpening the overall image
12. Significant Damage- cleaning up all the tape stains, cracks and lines on the car, street and building, opening up highlights, shadows and mid-tones, adjusting brightness/contrast , sharpening
The digital restoration workflow consists of:
5. scanning a photograph or film
6. performing the restoration or retouching using photo-editing software
7. printing out the photograph using a high quality
8. storing the restoration on a removable media such as CD-ROM

http://photorestorations.org/