Old photo restoration - over exposed?

LiNgWiStIkZ

I'm restoring a photo of my great grandmother for my grandmother, and I've pretty much got everything else sorted except for the torso and some fine details.

The torso is overexposed and has no detail. I've tried to recover some detail but it's not happening.
What can I do? I don't have a tablet either. Using a mouse and keyboard with CS5.

Resized pics, lemme know if you want the full sized ones.




WIP photo:




Old photo :

charybdis

I'm assuming since this is a scan of a print you don't have access to the original negative.

It's hard to know whether the lack of detail in the torso is actually the way it was printed, as a result of the damage to the print, or (most likely) not captured by the scanner.

I suggest you re-scan the print and check your scanner's histogram if possible to see whether or not the tonal range of the print is not being clipped.

Heebie

If you have an analog print like that, a halfway decent scanner should be able to get the detail out of it.. the trick is getting as much data as possible out of the image.
I'm very good at it. (I used to do it all the time.) It's a bit hard to explain the exact details without a live histogram in front of you to refer to.

smelltheglove

As for scanning images I wouldnt have a huge amount of knowledge but the way I see it, if the details is not in the print itself then you can't get it back. Does the print in fact look just like it is on screen? Youve done a very good job with the restoration, one which I am sure your Grandmother will love.

Heebie

That's not true. If it's an original analogue print.. all the nuances etc.. are likely still there. Exposure to light has just faded them.. and compressed the details into such a narrow band of colors that the human eye cannot discern them.. but a scanner can. (The eye can make out approximate 10 million shades of color.. a good scanner can see billions of shades of color.) The original actually looks like a faded color image.. so it's probably possible for someone who's really gifted with a scanner to pull out even a fair bit of color information. (If it's a sepia tone, or some other kind of toning that makes it look green, then that's not the case.) A scanner in the Epson Perfection line (with a skilled operator) should be able to recover that. (and if someone has an even better scanner.. then even more.)
I did get a somewhat grainy image of a bouquet of purple flowers off of a negative that looked blank to the naked eye. (That was on a Nikon Super Coolscan 8000ED a few years back, but the technique is the same... and I think it works a lot better than the automatic "color restoration" I can turn on on my Epson scanner.)

Get me the original, and I'll gladly give it a bash. (Could be fun to document the process photographically to post on here too... but I'm far too lazy to do that bit myself!)

If the photo you have is actually a copy made from an original.. it's not likely to have much information in it due to generational loss of detail.

smelltheglove wrote: »

As for scanning images I wouldnt have a huge amount of knowledge but the way I see it, if the details is not in the print itself then you can't get it back. Does the print in fact look just like it is on screen? Youve done a very good job with the restoration, one which I am sure your Grandmother will love.

Heebie

Some Photo-Flo (stabiliser you'd use in a darkroom) for about a 5-minute bath and some swishing about.. then letting it hang dry in a warmish, dry place might get rid of the two liquid stains on the image before scanning as well.. depending on what they are, and whether they have oxidized the emulsion or not. (could damage the image further if left in it for too long, or if it's gotten really fragile... so not something to think about lightly... but there's a spot that looks like the detail is likely obscured by a coffee stain.)