New To The Forum

[Kevster66]

Hi all
just thought I'd say a quick hello.
I'm fairly new to photo editing, and joined the site to get some help and advice on a couple of projects, I've aquired some old photo's from my dad who recently passed away.
Some of them have been in frames for years and are badly faded except for the part under the frame, just a few tips on where to actually start would be great 😊

Cheers all

KK

[plugsnpixels]

Re: New To The Forum

Hi KK, welcome!

My father passed earlier this year too and as a result some previously unseen family photos came my way.

The quickest way to get some detail out of your photos is to scan them at high resolution, then pop the Levels (restoring the black tones and brightening up the whites). That alone should help.

Exclude the unfaded areas from under the frames in your treatment as they would skew the Levels display. Scan the entire image, then draw a rectangular marquee over just the faded area and treat it until it matches the undamaged area.

Here are a couple examples of old family tintypes on which I used this technique. Otherwise you could barely see anything. The worst of the two seems to be of a church. I suspect there was an amateur photographer in the family circa-1870s.

Please post your work!

[Kevster66]

Re: New To The Forum

Hi plugsnpixels thanks for the advice ill try it out, when uploading a photo is there any size restrictions? or am I best to upload a low resolution version
Cheers

[plugsnpixels]

Re: New To The Forum

Lo-res. You'll see the file size limit in the upload dialog.

[Kevster66]

Re: New To The Forum

Here's one of the photo's I've been looking at restoring, not quite sure the best way to start so any advice would be great
Cheers

[plugsnpixels]

Re: New To The Forum

That photo is not bad off at all, at least tone-wise.

I converted it to grayscale (since is was shot in B&W anyway and the yellowing wasn't there originally), used Photoshop's clone and healing tools to clean up the worst of the cracks, evened the tones a bit using Shadows/Highlights and cropped to clean up the torn edges.

Just a quickie job ;-)