Old photographs always be B&W

The whites invariably darken and turned anywhere
from pale tan to dark brown. The image itself may be faded, so the
overall contrast can be extremely low. The damage is often very non-
uniform, so you’ll have to make local corrections to the tones as well as
overall ones. Dodging and burning masks are of considerable help.

All of the photos will have some degree of physical damage. Restoring the tonal range of a low-contrast photo exaggerates theaws ; in extreme cases you’ll be dealing with “noise” that is almost as
strong as the “signal.” Very old photographs as I noticed on Unique
Photo are often missing pieces of
the emulsion that will need to be re-created to make the photograph
look good again.

Many of the photographs wil l have “tarnished out”; there will be
shiny metallic-looking bronze or silver patches on the surface of the
photograph, especially in higher density areas . You’ll do
best to attack those with selective masking so that you can correct those problems separately from the
rest of the photograph. Damage Control,tells you
how to repair tarnish.

You’ll see a fair number of hand-tinted B&W portraits. They will
present you with challenging questions, not technical in nature, but
artistic. If the goal is to produce a good-looking, hand-tinted portrait,
modern tastes andsensibilities around such work a re very different from
those of 50 to 100 years ago. By today’s standards, you may get a more
pleasing photograph by eliminating the tinting entirely and turning it into a straight B&W photograph.

If your objective is to produce an historically accurate restoration,
then you’ll need to know a lot about the tools and techniques, not to
mention the aesthetics, of the erawhen the photograph was made. The
tints you see in the damaged photograph will not be representative of
the original hues, and anything that you do to restore proper tone and
contrast and eliminate stain and yellowing will alter the colors in ways you can’t predict. Professional photographers usually took better
care of their photographs than amateurs, and the photographs were
usually made with more care and processed better.

Until we get back into the “vintage” era, professional photographs for the most part look better than comparable a mateurones. The most notable exception is that color prints will fade regardless of how well they were processed (although the cheap processing of many cheap commercial portraits significantly accelerated their fading), so old professiona l color prints may look just as bad as amateur ones of the sameera. Except for color dye fading, though, you’re more likely to get a modern professional photograph to restore because it’s suf fered physical damage than because it’s badly in need of tone and color correction.