Help! Black Fadeout Problem!

[willster98]

I have an old photo that I am trying to restore for my mother-in-law, but the dark areas (hairlines, for example) have deteriorated and are now a shiny black/silver color. I am not sure how to classify the problem, but I have not been able to find a good tutorial to help remove or fix it. I hope someone can help me identify the issue and maybe solve the problem. Thanks!

[mistermonday]

Willster, Welcome to RP.
First problem is that the image you uploaded is way too compressed and has severe jpeg pixelation. Hopefully you have a higher resolution scan to work on. If the blue reflection is not actually on the original photo, try rescanning it at a different angle. If the discoloration is actually part of the image then you can convert the image to B&W and work on the damaged area and when you are finished, just apply a Sepia or Duotone effect or leave the image in B&W. The quick fix to the damaged area would be to turn it into a vignette or blur the background. You can try to restore the lower parts of the people and their clothing, you will need to cut and paste parts in form other images as the detail has been obliterated. I did a quick fix as an example and have attached it below.
Good luck with your restoration.
Regards, Murray

[Daviskw]

Hi there

Not too pleased with my version but I am suffering from brain freeze just now.

I used the green channel to remove color. Then with blank layers set to luminosity I copied tone in the hair then the surrounding areas to even things out. Then with levels and hue/saturation I refined the tone I wanted.

A generous dose of noise filtering and an application of sepia tone and a sharpen layer to finish off.

I’m sure someone will have some better ideas.

Butch

[Littlecoo]

That is a lovely portrait, I can't tell for sure how effected the detail in the 'silvered' areas is from your posted image... did you scan it? If so the silver will show a bit of sheen... I think there is a tutorial for scanning textured and glossy prints on this site somewhere... I post a link when locate it.
In regards of print itself, this problem I think is refered to as colloidial silver ('free silver', 'silvering', 'blue silvering'), which is in such small form that it can migrate eventually to the surfaces of the print. Another term that comes to mind is Oxidative Fading. It is mostly caused by oxidizing influences in the enviroment, humidity, and/or inproper care during print development, and eventually just time itself with light as the catalyst. This is common in most silver based prints. Sepia or selenium toning prevents this problem to a great extent. I hope this sheds some light (um, safelight that is)

[Littlecoo]

Here's the tutorial that I had in mind.

[Yoolan]

i have another version. only a little retouch...

[img=http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/5223/retouch1wx.th.jpg]

1. desturate and colorized
2. burned the shiny parts
3. applied a curve-layer to remove the black points in background

[willster98]

Everyone's help has been amazing, and has given me lots of great ideas to work with. Just an FYI, I do have the original, and it is a scan. I have a higher quality photo if anyone would like a copy, just contact me through email in my profile. In the meantime I will work on it, see if I can remove those "silver" areas. Thanks again!

[Flora]

Hi,

willster98,

Welcome to RP!!

your posted picture is only 21.2 KB with a lot of compression artifacts .. (allowed attachments' size = 100 KB) ...

I had a go and used Hue/Saturation on the 'silvering' (no detail hidden in there though...)

Used the Levels to lift the shadows a bit.

Neat Image to minimize the 'artifacts' on the group of people.

Lightly sharpened the people only...

[Kraellin]

willster98,

welcome to RP.

i worked on this last and then came in today and saw flora's and thought, 'hue/sat! of course.'. so, i started over. that will be a big time saver. you can use that as an adjustment layer or a direct application. you could make a selection of the silvered area or work on the entire image as a whole and simply reduce the blues down to no saturation and lower the lightness a bit. not sure how flora did hers.

from there it gets fairly easy. the background needs some cleaning and that can vary how you do that. i used a lot of heavy smudging to simply blur and clean. probably an easier way, but oh well.

and instead of neat image, like flora uses, i used paint shop pro's digital camera noise removal, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. i then ran a .jpg artifact remover behind that.

i also ran a 'shadows/midtones/highlights' filter to adjust for brightness.

from there it was just little cleanups here and there with push and smudge on a separate blank layer.

and flora, nice job and thanks for the reminder of hue/sat

craig

[willster98]

Again, everyone has had super ideas. I will look into what I can do and get back with the group! Thanks so much...

[willster98]

I have a link to the PSD file on my website. The original photoshop file is scanned in at 600dpi and is around 50 megs:

Original PSD file

[danko]

Hi everyone. I hope you'll be willing to continue on this topic since I think it's a common and important one. It's one that I've attempted to work on a few times on a few photos over the years as my Photoshop skills have gradually developed. I have a number of photos with this same problem (and more detail hidden in the involved areas) and have tried several approaches to solve it. It seems the best would be a specially made scanner with polarized light and polarized glass, but since that technology is not available to me yet, I’ve tried a few other things. One is photographing the photo with an angled light source. Two major problems with this, low resolution and nonuniform lighting. So back to the scanner. It seems that with as prevalent a problem as this is, someone could make a Photoshop plugin tool to address it specifically. Since these are black and white photos and the silver reflection comes out fairly blue, working with colors as target problem areas seems to be the best way to approach it. I’ve fiddled with Hue/Saturation and tried to darken the blues and greens. For some reason I can’t get them quite dark enough by this method. The second method I’ve tried is selecting the cyan, blue, and green color ranges, (using a fully saturated adjustment layer to better see what I’m selecting) and then painting the selections dark or black. This works fairly well, but still misses some of the hues despite several attempts at using the eyedropper and widening the latitude of selected color. I’m getting close, but being a perfectionist I think there ought to be a better, more refined way that addresses perhaps that the blues should be treated differently than the greens. Or maybe I’m on the right track but just need to fiddle with the settings more to solve the Hue/Sat technique not getting dark enough or maybe the color range selection technique not selecting just the right amount of pixels. The four attachments are of a representative portion of one photo, first the original with silvering, then a fully saturated version to show the problem areas, then two attempts to fix the problem using (a) Hue/Sat and (b) darkening selected color ranges. The Hue/Sat one still has areas that are too light. The color selection one I think is better but has pixels that are not evenly transitioning with nearby ones still too light. Maybe I should combine both and choose the best parts of each, but it seems there should be a better way. Any enlightening thoughts? Or should we say "endarkening?"

[duwayne]

I downloaded the high-resolution version from willster98’s web site. I don’t really understand all the technicalities of what I did but it seems to have worked.

Duplicate background layer

IMAGE -> ADJUSTMENT -> LEVELS, select blue channel, white-point slider to 190, mid tone slider to 150. Select red channel, black-point slider to 30.

SELECT-> COLOR RANGE, sampled the blue and set fuzziness to 200

LAYER -> NEW -> VIA COPY, blending mode -> color burn

Delete the background copy layer

Turned it on and off, everything else is the same. Only the silver is gone.


WILLSTER98 – can you try this to see if you get the same results

[Flora]

Hi danko,

welcome to RP!!

Originally Posted by danko

Since these are black and white photos and the silver reflection comes out fairly blue,

... Right, but more than black & white, these old pictures tend to become 'sepia' ... I'm no expert on this, but, apparently, the emulsion used in the past seems to deteriorate in such a way that the blue channel is the most damaged ... If the blue channel is damaged, the lighter spots in it will tend to look blue in your composite view... (If you desaturate your picture completely, you'll notice that the 'silvery blue' simply turns into a lighter shade of grey ... thus making restoration easier since you'd only have to darken the lighter discolorations without having to worry about colour... )

... But, if like me, you'd rather work with the original tint,

Originally Posted by danko

working with colors as target problem areas seems to be the best way to approach it.

that's a very good way to start... (if you read my previous post on this Thread, you see that's what I did as well...)

Originally Posted by danko

I’ve fiddled with Hue/Saturation and tried to darken the blues and greens. For some reason I can’t get them quite dark enough by this method.

... same here ... ... (I always say that each image has a life and a mind of its own ... ) ... Here is where we went different ways .... Beside the silvering, ( Help! Black Fadeout Problem!), your picture has exposure problems as well ... so ... instead of going for a Color Range Selection, I opted for a Selective Colors Adjustment Layers first ... This because I wanted to have the possibility to decrease the 'black' in the shadows to uncover details while starting to correct the silvering ...

My Selective Colors settings in Attachments 1 & 2

After this, the image was better balanced but still had a lighter bluish cast... that's when I used a Hue/Saturation A.L. where I decreased to -100 the Lightness in Greens, Cyans and Blues...

My results After Selective Colors only and after Hue/saturation in Attachment 3

A selective Levels A.L. took care of the fading in the top half of the image ... Attachment 4 ....

... I, then, would start the 'real' restoration at this point ...

[danko]

Thanks Flora.

Regarding working with original tint vs black and white, I think it’s critical to keep the color at first (and helpful to look at it through a fully saturated adjustment layer) because it lets you see which areas are lightened by the silvering. If you get rid of the color, then you have to guess which areas look light because they are supposed to vs which areas look that way because of silvering.

I’ll have to learn more about the adjustments you use in Selective Color options. They do seem to help with the exposure levels. When should you use relative vs absolute? My initial plan was to leave the exposure levels for a later step after the silver corrections were all accounted for. Any advantage to doing it with Selective Color early in the process?

I think the significant difference between using Hue/Sat vs making selections and masks from a color range is that with Hue/Sat I can’t get the affected pixels darkened enough. I think that’s because within a silverized pixel, all the color range is represented within it and if we fully darken the blues, cyans, and greens, only some of the components contributing to the pixel’s luminosity are darkened. This results in a dark gray instead of bringing back the original presumably darker tone. On the other hand, if we go with selecting a color range and then painting, then it affects more than just the fraction proportional to the blue, cyan, and green content. This is more complete, but may overdo it. The hard parts are getting the right color range selection and the right degree of darkening. Maybe even a couple separate selections for blues vs cyans vs greens and darkening them each to different degrees would give finer control over the correction.

Going back to the Hue/Sat method which seems like it ought to be the most refined method, there’s probably a way to amplify the effect of the darkening. I don’t know enough Photoshop yet, but what about making a subtraction or differential image layer that is basically the Hue/Sat adjusted minus the original, then duplicating, darkening, or burning based on that differential layer?