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Capture and restore old photos and slides
Mike Bedford shows you how to scan, repair and archive old film-based photos, to give your family heirlooms a new lease of life.
OUR EXPERT
Mike Bedford has an extensive collection of film-based photos, both his own and those he inherited, so he’s taken quite an interest in preservation and restoration.
Be sure to clean as much loose dust, dirt and hairs off your photos before you scan them. Don’t use a cloth, though, because that could cause scratches, and don’t try using a solvent unless you know exactly what you’re doing. Instead, use a compressed air can, but don’t hold it too close because that could damaging your photo by freezing it.
Traditional photos, by which we mean the prints, negatives or slides produced by the T chemical processes that predated digital photography by well over 100 years, can be remarkably resilient. In fact, it’s been suggested that, while we might have inherited photos taken by our grandparents or great grandparents, it’s much less likely that today’s digital photos will be available to future generations.
Our reference to resilience requires some clarification, because it’s by no means guaranteed. For a start, while black-and-white photos are based on a chemical reaction involving silver halides, which are moderately fade-resistant, the dyes used in colour photography were not nearly as forgiving. And second, even in the realm of black-and-white photography, the resilience assumes that the prints or negatives have been well looked after. In reality, this might not be the case. Prints have often been well handled over the decades, so creases, tears, fingerprints and tea stains will have taken their toll. And while negatives have probably not been handled as much, in poor storage conditions – at a non-ideal temperature or high humidity – they could have become dirty, damaged by water or infested by mildew, to name just a few risks.
All this sounds rather depressing, because those old photos might be the only records you have of longgone family members. However, there is a solution. Here we’re going to see how to restore photos that have lost their former glory by using photo-editing software. In fact, you might just be able to make them better than Great Uncle George would have remembered them.
Digitisation
Because your old photos only become eligible for editing once they’re in the digital domain, we first need to give some thought to digitisation. If the media is a slide, there probably won’t be an associated print, so you’ll need to scan the slide, and this involves much the same process as for scanning negatives.
To take an extreme example, the old disk film that was introduced by Kodak in 1982 had a negative measuring just 8x10mm (0.3x0.4 inches), which is very significantly smaller than a typical 4x6-inch print. The relevance of this difference depends on your scanner’s resolution. However, if we assume 1,200x1,200dpi, that would result in a difference between 360x480 pixels (less than 0.2MP) for the digitised negative and 4,800x 7,200 pixels (35MP) for the digitised print. With the former being totally inadequate, the recommendation would be to scan the print, even though you wouldn’t be achieving the quality that the 35MP figure might suggest, because the optical resolution inherent in the print would probably be lower. Be sure to save your scan in a lossless format such as TIFF and, during the editing process, save all the intermediate results in the same lossless format, so that compression artefacts don’t build up. If necessary, though, you can also save a copy of the final results as a JPEG. Also, in the case of a black-and-white photo, save the scan as a monochrome file – greyscale – since it’ll give both better results and a smaller file size than if you saved it as a colour file.