Physical (not digital) Solutions to Restoring

[Nezbitten]

Hi Carol, I used the nose for scratch repairs. Rub a finger on the side of your nose, in the crease just behind your nostril. Rub this into the scratch on the negative and gently buff off with neg cloth. I have some great examples of this before and after in my old College portfolio. It was good for repairing the tramline scratches that were sometimes found running the length of strips of negatives where a neg squeegee scratched them when cleaning off the final wetting agent.

[Carol Heath]

Great, cheap technique wasn't it? You have to wonder who first thought of using grease from our skin. Very effective though. Yes, it did work great for fine scratches as well.

Originally Posted by Nezbitten

Hi Carol, I used the nose for scratch repairs. Rub a finger on the side of your nose, in the crease just behind your nostril. Rub this into the scratch on the negative and gently buff off with neg cloth. I have some great examples of this before and after in my old College portfolio. It was good for repairing the tramline scratches that were sometimes found running the length of strips of negatives where a neg squeegee scratched them when cleaning off the final wetting agent.

[Nezbitten]

Hi Carol, I guess the idea of it was the fine oils deflect the and difuse the light just enough to blur over the scratches. An early dust and scratch filter! Not sure how it would effect the negative long term though?

[spotter]

I worked in a photo printers. We were the spotters and worked on negs and prints and even exhibition displays. Black scratches were removed on the negs using opaque(a sort of clay coloured paint).We had to fill in the scratches etc with small tipped brushes. Vignetting was often done by rubbing red dye into a negative in the right shape .
I have cut and pasted many a neg together to produce an all in one negative (composite) with both line and grey scale pictures. We used red litho tape to hold it all together .Ofcourse that was all on black and white negs and they were made specially to be worked on.
Masking on colour negs was done with silver tape and opaque as the red litho tape showed up in colour printing.
We also did colour spotting with inks and sometimes paints.
Large restoration of the prints was done by Ivy the air brush lady who was a terrible clutz in everyday life but did the most fantastic detailed retouching work with paint brush and basic inks.
We would bleach out items of the colour prints using pottasium metabisulphate,pottasium permanganate and dilute sulphuric acid. That would leave a white background on which to work.
Ball point pen was removable using methylated spirits and cotton wool.This was also often used by the mounting room men just to clean off dust and would sometimes unwaringly wipe off the retouching aswell .
Very stubborn Glues from tape etc were removed with tricloethylene which removed marker pen too.
The dark room often used silver cleaner to reduce silver on originals(the wadding stuff you get in a tin).

[Kraellin]

thank you, spotter! good stuff there. i especially liked the pen and marker pen solutions.

oh, and welcome to RP!

[spotter]

Thanks Kraellin, Hubby worked in darkrooms producing dupes(duplicate trannys) and printing. He said the face grease thing was well known there but that vaseline was also used.
I forgot to mention knife work which was basically the use of a scalpel to scrape off the top layer on B&W photos to leave a layer to work on, that was possible with paper based prints but not with the newer plastic based papers. Some of the more modern colour transparencies also had a white layer which could be revealed with knife work.Those had an opalescent base layer and three colour layers above and were mostly used for massive transparensies for adverts and exhibitions.

[Kraellin]

thanks, spotter

[tbergphoto]

reading this I'm suddenly not feeling so old! They made us do our own spotting back in photography school...which was decades ago.

And they wouldn't let us use 35mm cameras -- just a fad -- LOL.

[4personnen]

I also used my nose :-) it works very well...As for the oily marks you can use bread (the soft interior of the bread, without any crust) that you roll into a ball and rub gently onto the stains...As I'm French we used sour dough bread, I don't know if it works with sweet bread like people have in here (UK). It acts like a sponge.
I have some links and hints from somewhere in another hard drive that I cannot reach at the moment... especially on ancient techniques that I used when I was younger. we used to make our own developers. At that time chemicals used to cost an arm and a leg, and making your own was a real issue. I'll provide that later, if it helps...

I recommend for French readers or it has been translated

Pierre Glafkides
http://openlibrary.org/works/OL12411...phic_chemistry

It's the best resource hence not young on photographic chemistry. (my opinion)

[Kraellin]

merci, 4personnen.

and yes, anything you have on this topic, do post it!

[4personnen]

Originally Posted by Kraellin

merci, 4personnen.

and yes, anything you have on this topic, do post it!

the version I posted is the one translated in English, but there are "newer versions" from about the 80's. I was able to find one at my local uni library, hidden somewhere, you got to ask someone to dig it up :-). For the book is sold at nonsense prices on Abebooks, if anybody finds one at auctions or in an attic sale, worth to buy it if only for resale.

I'll keep in touch once I put my hand on this HDD.

Just remember one link
www.alternativephotography.com

[4personnen]

Hi I'm back with my hard drive and some bad news...most of the sites I've saved the links of are broken, most were in French but some in English...
Fortunately I've found that which seems to be a great recourse for alternative Process

http://decisivemomentum.blogspot.com/

Reminds me of that book by David Scopick I struggled for weeks to find (in these old days)

Like also this artist (livick)
an image there
http://www.livick.com/gallery/veil/tangle.jpg

the site here
http://www.livick.com/

[TServo]

Hey everyone. So this is my first post (yay!!) but this is right up my alley.

I really liked reading about the hand-coloring techniques!!!!

Originally Posted by Kraellin

what do you do to physically handle water damage; what do you do to physically handle stains, tears, folds, rips, wrinkles, mud, dirt and dust? how do you remove a photo that is stuck to glass or stuck in one of those 'magnetic' photo albums?

I work primarily digitally, but I've found that cleaning photos before scanning saves me a TON of Ps time. For emulsion-based prints, I use a Q-tip and distilled water to remove caked-on debris. For the antique type photos that are printed on thick paper or boards (the kind getting wet won't help at all) I've had some success picking debris off with a very sharp X-acto knife while looking under a magnifying glass.

It seems rather crude, but I've found that just taping rips and tears closed before scanning helps a lot. I always try to tape on the back of the photo with a thin document tape, though, just in case the owner wants to keep the original.

Any other wrinkles, creases, curls or warping, I like to flatten photos before scanning. I use a heat press, like the ones used for dry mounting.

For anything that's stuck, I usually try to soak free, unless the emulsion is too badly damaged and can't handle any more water. This doesn't always work- wet emulsion that dries adhered to something practically turns to cement. If I can't get it free, or it's too unstable to soak, sometimes I scan the picture through the glass or plastic. The resulting image is usually hazy and is never as sharp as the original, but it's a last resort. My customers are usually happy just to get something back when their options are a slightly blurry picture or nothing at all!

Hope that helps someone out there!
-KP

[Kraellin]

thanks, tservo, and welcome to RP

[Jessie711]

I have a number of photos my cousin sent me and she attached post-notes to the face of the photos (bless her heart) identifying who is who.

When I remove the post-note it leaves a residue on the photo. Can anyone suggest the best way to remove the residue?

Thanks
Jessie