Fast Fix Ups for Faded Snapshots

Classy Restorations at Yesteryear's Prices

Before and after of class picture restoration.

Family-album restoration is our January special at Vashon Island Imaging. We're offering a scan, touch-up and a 5 X 7 giclée print on heavy-weight art paper (Epson® Enhanced Matte) for $15.00.

Hmmmmm... $15.00. That's about what I used to charge way back in 1972 for an 8X10 printed on Kodabromide® paper... double weight Kodabromide.

Even if 1972 is ancient history for you, any printer knows that's an incredible bargain. However, if you are a customer, that low price makes restoring fading family snapshots affordable. Any higher price risks putting an 'extravagance' like photo-album maintenance out of most families reach these days.

Affordability is the key word in our new economy. It's more than a word, being also a concept whose time has returned. 'Mature' printers like me have been in this situation before. I've been there three times in my life when the economy goes through one of these 'cycles'.

But I digress... and you can read my opinion about all that in an earlier blog. (The Creature from Jekyll Island... at http://gicléeprepress.blogspot.com or www.mesney.com .)

To be able to offer such a low price we've got to work efficiently. Fortunately, most faded color prints share the same problems and can be fixed up fast using the following procedures:

Underexpose the Copy

Faded photos show problems worst in the highlights, the light tones. The whole picture is usually bleached looking. However, fading in the dark tones can actually work in your favor as the lightened shadows reveal more details.

The essence of the problem is that the light tones have little differentiation any more. They must be treated as 'latent images'.

Technically speaking for a moment... Latent images are imprints of light captured by film. The light begins a chemical process in the emulsion, which is later developed. The chemicals used to develop the latent image continue the chemical reaction started by the light... the breakdown of silver halides into particles of metallic silver, called 'grain'. It is those grainy metallic-silver particles in film and photo paper that form the visible image.

[In color film, halides of other metals are used and they are replaced with chemical dyes during development. No matter the process, it all begins with a latent image.]

Compression Reversed = Expansion

The development of latent images involves expansion of tone differentials. That's a fancy way of saying you've got to build up the contrast and doing that requires density. The original density has faded away, and now has to be restored. Underexposure accomplishes that in an instant.

Underexposure results in a miserable looking reproduction,

which is ideal for generating contrast.
This is actually 1.3 stops below the ideal exposure.
[Note that the bottom edge is a gray-card with ruled increments.]

Normally I make three exposures, one normal and two darker. For the initial exposure I find the point at which white falls off the histogram and back off 1/3 stop. The two subsequent exposures are bracketed a further two thirds of a stop. Nine times out of ten I will end up working with the darkest of the three. That's what I did with this one...

Auto Levels Finds New 'Poles'

90% of the time, Auto Levels does 90% of the work.

Copy the dark original and use Auto Levels to re-set the picture. Before you do that, crop out the white borders and anything else that's white or black... unless of course it is part of the picture's subject.

The objective is to have Auto Levels create new black and white points, which are the twin poles of a new histogram. Auto Levels will also do some color correction, too.

Auto Levels will set the white point too high for giclée printing however. Remember, 'auto' anything is geared for the mid tones. Darks and lights suffer as a result. But there is a quick fix for that...

Lower Highlight Brightness to Add Details

Adjust the Auto Levels layer further by using Brightness & Contrast to add ink to the highlights. ...Huh?

Adding ink to light tones seems counterintuitive but in this case we do really want them to be darker... not much, just enough to add a little ink... 3-5 points on the CMYK Info Panel is the minimum... or 250 on the RGB scale.

The purpose of the density is to reduce paper glare in the white areas, and build up density in the nearest light tones to obtain visible differentiation.

Density can be further enhanced quickly by burning the highlights with a very light touch (lower the brush opacity).

Importantly, every printing press is different. Where a three-point density adjustment is visible on the Epson® 9900 10-color printer we use at Vashon Island Imaging, you may need more... or less.

Dial your system until you just a tad of density in the whites. The border of the paper or canvas should be the only part devoid of any ink.

At this point there is a 'Leveled' layer atop

the dark original picture layer.

Separate Skin Tones

Make a layer that has the color adjusted for the skin tones. For a starting point try this using Image | Adjust | Color Balance

• Shadows add 22 points of red and yellow
• Mid tones add 22 points of red
• Highlights add 11 points of yellow

The adjustment depends on your version of skin color, of course.
The point is that yellow and red must be added to the skin...
...not blue or green.

Separate and 'Colorize' the FG and BG

Colorization is a term I coined to describe the hyped-up colors that I like so well.

Sending the color in a particular direction using color adjustments like those above,
then saturating it to some degree does it all. Another way is to saturate first and then
tame that with color adjustments.

Quite often the foreground (FG) needs a completely different color enhancement than the background (BG). Above, the FG grass needed a big kick of yellow in the dark tones, green in the mid-tones and a kiss of blue in the highlights. The BG roof layer needed heavy red in the shadows with red and yellow in the mid tones and a kiss of yellow in the highlight regions.

The colorized layers were blended with the warm (skin) tones layer using gradient masks. (Previous blogs and my book detail those masking procedures.)

Erase Through Warm Layer to Reveal Cold Tone Layer

In this scene, most of the people were wearing

brown suits so only a little erasure was needed
to get a realistic looking effect.

Erase through the warm (skin) tone layer to reveal anything that needs to be white, letting the cold tones (Auto Levels) layer show through in those parts.

Adjust the opacity of the warm tone layer to get a good balance with the cold tones layer.

Group Merge & Saturate

Five-layer stack before merging.

After merging the results so far, give it a final saturation adjustment. Over saturate slightly because the next step is sharpening, which reduces saturation by adding white and black.

Merged layer saturated by 22 points.

Sharpen & Blend

Copy the saturated image onto a new layer and sharpen it. For this 4000 X 2600 pixel image the setting for Unsharp Mask was 2.2 / 222.

Sharpened saturated layer blended 77%
with dark original to dirty the colors slightly.
De-saturating produces a similar effect but not the same.
Blending with the underexposed original produces 'dynamic dirtiness'.
De-saturation attenuates all tones equally.

The sharpened layer is placed uppermost in the stack of layers and its opacity is usually slightly reduced to avoid the crisp electronic look of a heavily sharpened image. The amount of adjustment depends on the image. As you already know from previous blogs, some pictures actually benefit from hard sharpening.

Life In the Fast Lane

Do you watch auto racing? Well, these procedures are like the giclée version of a pit stop... in and out fast. The above transformation was done in 12 minutes and produced a pleasing 8 X 10 giclée as a result. It took twelve times longer to write and illustrate this blog about it than it took to do the restoration work.

The procedures seem complex at first but there's really nothing to it. After a dozen or two you'll hum along at lightning speed.

By being able to process 5 such pictures per hour, our studio is able to generate reasonable hourly earnings while our customers benefit from reasonable prices that are affordable in today's unreasonable economy.

At least that's my reasoning.