Tip #2628 - Restore Damaged Photos
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Restore
Damaged Photos
Do you keep old photographs
no matter what shape they're in? Most of us have pictures of our ancestor’s
stored away somewhere. They are preserved carefully away from the dust
and the kids. These are the same black and white pictures that have gone
through years of wear and tear and they show clear signs of it as well.
If only you had a penny for every time you wished those pictures could
be restored. Well, wish no more.
The good thing is
that with the kind of technology we have available to us today, this is
not an impossible task. For this tutorial, we will once again fall back
on our friendly tool: Photoshop. First of all, of course, you need to
scan the picture you want to restore onto your computer. I'll wait while
you do that.
Okay, here is my example.
As you can see, the picture is pretty damaged. Especially the edges toward
the right. We’ll start the resurrection by using the healing brush
tool. This tool helps you copy the selected image of an area of the picture
to another part of it.
Now that you have
selected the healing brush tool (as shown above), you can select the area
of the picture that you want to replicate by using Alt + a left
click on the healing brush to that area. The part on which you
ALT + left click gets copied to the clipboard.
To paste it over the
affected area that you want to “heal,” just stroke the brush
over it. Make sure you use it tastefully so that it doesn’t look
overdone or too different from the surrounding areas.
Another way to “heal”
is to make the brush size pretty large and click just once on the affected
area instead of brushing it. It can be pretty effective if surrounding
patterns aren’t too different from the one that you are going to
paste. However, when it comes to detailed restoration (like in the screenshot
below), it helps to just brush over the torn area. It’s also a good
idea to zoom in to be able to restore the damaged area more precisely.
After you follow the
above mentioned technique, your picture should look something like this:
Another way to do
the exact same thing is to use the clone stamp tool. It functions in the
same manner (Alt+click) and it gets the job done in a similar way.
Another trick to restoring
old pictures is efficient use of the blur tool. The blur helps you soften
up the areas that are giving you trouble. When something is not blending
quite the right way, just use the blur tool and see the magic.
Now, you need to follow
the above techniques individually or in combination with each other. If
you do, you will be able to restore almost any damaged image from yesteryears.
This is what I ended up with:
After the image is
restored, the possibilities are endless. You can correct the color balance,
brightness, contrast, etc. Now, can you imagine the smiles on the faces
of your family members when you show them your handiwork? I bet they'll
be big and bright! : )
~ Yogesh Bakshi
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