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restoring an old photo


J

Juwill

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IMG_0038.jpg
IMG_0038c.jpg
First of all, I'm not asking for anyone to do this for me - I just need advice on what to do. The top image looks like a negative but it's actually a print from an old, old roll of 35mm film. Most of the photos printed as faded B&Ws, but some printed like this. I'd like to restore the photo as best I can, but I'm not getting good results (second image). I first inverted the image and then desaturated. Then I did adjustments with curves. The resulting image is confusing - the light source seems backwards. Any thoughts?
 
There is a phenomenon called "solarization" that sometimes happens to negatives and prints and can look a lot like this. It causes the curve of density versus exposure to be non-monotonic. That could explain why the lighting looked " backwards " to u.

T
 
In the top image, some of the elements look positive but some, especially the people, look negative - due to the solarization effect I assume? So I don't think inverting the entire image is the answer. Do I have to treat each specific area as needed or is there an adjustment or filter that will perform the necessary action? (Yes, I want a magic button!)
 
Hi -

When I responded earlier, I was using my little iPhone to view your image. Now that I see it on my good PS monitor, I don't think it's just pure solarization (as if that wouldn't be enough to deal with). Rather, in addition to solariation, I think that different parts of the image were exposed to different environments (eg, some were exposed to sunlight more than the others, maybe some areas were exposed to the air whereas others were in the middle of a stack of photos, etc. etc.).

If it were a case of uniform solarization, you are exactly correct that you would have to treat different areas differently. An idealized example of this is shown in the graph below. It demonstrates that if you see a area with a certain darkness on your negative or print, it could be caused by two different amounts of light (aka, exposures).

As you correctly observed, this means that, in principle, you would have to look at each area and try to tell which part of the curve was being represented. In addition, there's an even more problematic issue: the peak of the curve is flat, so a darkening of the media by that amount could be caused by a very large range of exposures, so you couldn't possibly know what caused this amount of darkening, and hence, wouldn't have clue how to fix such areas in PS.

The bottom line is that while there are plenty of plugins, actions, etc. to simulate solarization, I have never once seen anyone successfully reverse the process in post processing.

Unfortunately, if this image is very important to you, the only way that is guaranteed to work is to get the outlines of everything in the image, and then use them as a sketch to manually paint in a completely new picture.

There is no magic button.

Tom M

solarization-Sabatier_effect_graph-01.jpg
 
BTW, I presume you did a Google search using the term, "solarization" and found both the Wikipedia article, as well as all the nice B&W examples of solarization.

I haven't tried to simulate solarization for years, so, just for yucks, I quickly threw something together based on an image of some guys playing cards that I found on the web. There are a huge range of solarized looks possible, so this is just one look out of that huge set.

Tom
 

Attachments

  • normal_photo_men_playing_cards-ps02_simulate_solarization-composite_b4_after-01.jpg
    normal_photo_men_playing_cards-ps02_simulate_solarization-composite_b4_after-01.jpg
    285.6 KB · Views: 42
I'm not sure this one is any better than yours. I opened in ACR and I desaturated it there. Raised the clarity to the top. Then in PS I inverted it, and used Nik Vivesa to work on selected areas on the contrast, shadows and such. I used their Detail extractor filter. I smoothed out some of background with Topaz DeNoise and then airbrushed it some more. I don't think there is a "magic button". I still don't know what that big white blob is in the foreground. This is a snip as a png. Some advice, as you work on this, don't continue to save it as a Jpg, you lose detail everytime you compress it. Save it as PSD or Tiff.
Restore.PNG
 
When the OP first posted this image, just to get familiar with it, I also played around with it for a few minutes. Below is what I came up with. Unfortunately, I don't think it is much different what the OP or Larry (ALB) came up with. Other than embarking on a major, manual image restoration (eg re-painting parts of the scene), I don't think one can expect much better than this.

Tom

PS - For the record, I did surprisingly little to produce the attached image. I started with some adjustments in ACR (clarity (like Larry), inversion), then ran the Dust & Scratches filter on it twice (once in darken mode to get rid of all the bright pixels, and again in lighten mode to get rid of all the dark spots). I tweaked it a bit in curves, resized it down and that was it. For once, I don't think I used any plugins on this one. LOL.

IMG_0038-tjm01_acr-ps01b_698px_wide-01.jpg
 
Tom,
Yeah, I'm afraid your right. Just can't pull out things that don't exist. But your looks the best of the three. Sometimes less processing is more..a matter of knowing which buttons to push. (at which your a master)
 
colorburn-mode.jpgI would experiment with layer modes color burn especially this is about 10 seconds of playing around
I duplicated Tom's last image, two layers . created yellow layer between the two merged the top down, put top layer in color burn mode. With a patient selection you could probably make this a fairly decent image with time if something is missing pretend it's there:mrgreen:
 
Wow. Thanks for all the input! As I figured, this is a lot more complicated than what I want to get into, or even have the skill to do so. The photo means nothing to me personally, nor am I getting paid to fix it. So I think I'll just let it go as is. I trust you guys had fun playing with it? :)
 
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