Please help me with photo restoration - any guidance?

[hedliniv]

I have a question for any photo experts out there. My wife has an old family photo scrapbook (pictures from the 30's on and quite honestly most of them are in horrible condition.

If I wanted to have the all of the photos restored and don't mind spending some coin to have it done professionally, where do you start?

I would assume there are different technology and process. How can you ensure that it is better than what I could do with a copy of Photoshop?

Are there any questions a about the process that I should be asking?

Any recommendations or guidance would be most appreciated!

George

 

[Zarniwoop]

How many photo's are you talking about and how soon do you want them done?

Do you have access to a scanner?

A lot of photography places claim to be able to do photo restoration but may not put in the time and effort to get the best possible result especially if they have sentimental value. Take a not too overly precious photo to someone you think looks like they know what they are doing and give them a go on that one. Perhaps even try taking the same photo to a number of places.

Photoshop is definitely the way to go for a photo restore. There are some great tutorials on the web and a very good book on photo restoration is:
Katrin Eismann's Photoshop Restoration & Retouching

Below is a recent photo I restored for my father-in-law along with a little addition of my own.

 

[DavyRay]

There are professionals doing this. I do not know how you could distinguish between the hacks and the pros, though.

You could do this yourself. You will need a decent scanner, and PhotoShop or GIMP. GIMP is free, but you will have to do some reading to learn to use it well. Well-regarded scanners include the Epson Perfection V500, and earlier models. Scanning prints is easier than scanning negatives. If you can, do both. If you can scan prints and negatives at high resolution, the restoration part can always be done later by a pro. In other words, scanning to hi-res is one skill. Restoration to good print or digital image is a different skill.

 

[Rei]

If you don't mind spending some coin, and want it done right, then you would want to send it to a scanning service.

First, send ALL of the photos to a scanning service so that you can get all the scanning done professionally, and get the images back on archival CDs. Last I checked, it comes out to like 10 cents a photo for batch scanning or 25 cents for scanning and restoration, and negative or slides are easily handled (and get you better quality) from most of the services. There are a dozen vendors that do this. Off the top of my head, I can think of Scan Cafe, Digital Pickle, Scan Digital (Scan to Digital?), and Life Preserver. I've heard really good things about Life Preserver. I think that if you use one of the coupon codes from Scott Bourne, or anyone else that they sponsor, Scan Cafe is going to be the least expensive.

You can do this yourself, but you have to consider the fact that most of these scanning services use a scanner that is more expensive than what you will be paying them. If you want to get a N!kon 5000ED, or an Imacon scanner, you will be paying more than what it costs to use one of the services. If you are using a flatbed, or similar (Epson V500 is a popular choice), you are talking about a year or more of scanning these yourself if you have several family albums going back decades, but if you use a scanning service, you will have everything digitized in about a month.

Next, you want to organize and cull the images. Obviously, you aren't going to want to restore all the images, just the ones that are worth, sharing and printing. So, you pick up Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture, Picasa, digiKam, f-spot or iPhoto. Lots of people swear by Picasa and iPhoto because of the face recognition ability. OR, you could have a service like Shoot Dot Edit cull and organize them for you. OR, many of the scanning services put up a web gallery of the pre-scans so that you can cull and organize them as part of the scanning service.

Then, you want to restore the images that are worth restoring. Mainly, you want to do color work, colorizing and scratch removal. Some of the scanning services include this as part of the process. If you are scanning them yourself, you are going to want to do this in the scanning process, because you only want to touch each image once. Basically, if you scan, organize and correct in one step, you spend less time overall. Maybe a few minutes per image, but this saves you an hour of your time for every 50 images.

As far as tools go, if you have a higher end scanner that supports ICE, and outputs RAW (like a N!kon 5000ED), then you are going to want to get photoshop/lightroom, and the ASF plug-ins. ICE to remove scratches, ROC restores color balance in aged photos, SHO recovers highlights and shadows, and GEM to reduce grain without softening.

If you are going with an flatbed scanner, then you are going to want the onOne suite which includes PhotoTune and PhotoTools, which, between the two of them, do most of what the ASF tools will do. (Doesn't do ICE, but that has to be supported in the scanner hardware to begin with).

Again, some of the scanning services includes this work as part of the service, and if you are scanning yourself, there are several companies that will do the post-processing for you, (like shoot dot edit's color correction service).

Finally, when you are done, you should share all the photos with the family. Tons of ways to do this, and most people use a flickr pro account, but I recommend using the publish to facebook feature of Lightroom, and let the family start tagging themselves. Also, remember to burn DVD copies of the library of photos and send them out to family so that you have off-site back ups.

So, basically, if you turn it into a hobby, a year from now you might have the project done, and you can share a little at a time with the family as you get it done. Or, you can box everything up, send the photos to Scan Cafe (which includes culling, organizing and restoration as part of their service), and share everything with the family before Christmas.

 

[Bugadifino]

Great answer Rei. Everything the OP needs to know

 

[hedliniv]

I am amazed at the level of detail in your responses! Thank you so very very much!

P.S. - I researched Life Preserver and it looks like they recently went out of business. Both their direct and toll free number are dead. No website to be found, which is disappointing after hearing such glowing reviews. I think I will go with the service.

Thank you again!

George

 

[MHV]

Best reference on the subject so far would be this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Restoration-Start-Finish-photographs/dp/0240808142

Ctein is a great technical writer, a no-nonsense teacher, a great myth debunker, and someone with the ability to make the most complicated things simple. His books are well considered across the photographical community because of their depth and clarity. Lots of information well explained.

 

[thedeacon]

If your interested ..... I am a photoshop artist who restores old and vintage Photos along with colorizing .. please contact me for examples