Photo retouching can take a lot of patience and detail work. A few months ago, I was asked to fix a damaged photograph of my grand parents. I was provided with the original image which had been pinned to a closet door, collected dust and was severely scratched. The image itself had faded on the highlights. Dated somewhere in the mid 1950’s, it was impossible to track down the negative. All I had to work with was a black and white mangled print.

Original Scan

After 6 or 7 hours of work, using Photoshop, I was able to achieve a somewhat acceptable repair.

Workflow for retouching:

- Scan @ 300 DPI. Here I try to gather as much detail as possible without gathering too much detail. Scanning at a higher resolution in this case would render too much details about paper defects, cracks and wrinkles. The trick here is to know when scan resolution is too much. you can obtain just enough details about the image without collecting unwanted information by using a slightly resolution.

-Pre-Processing: I use mainly the Stamp tool, Dodge & burn tool, Crop, Curves, Alpha channels for specific selections. This was pre photoshop CS2, there was no healing brush available. If I had to redo this job now, I would use the healing brush more than the stamp tool.

Step 1: Adjust the lighting. Use an adjustment layer here. Use curves or levels to set the brightness, contrast, highlight and shadow values as you would print it. An adjustment layer will let you to review your changes on the main image, and allow you to tweak your curve later on as you see fit.

I usually try to keep the age factor of the photograph while doing the restoration work. This helps later on in post-processing. I like a 1950 photograph to still look like a 50 year old image, while removing all the external damage caused by mishandling, and all the things that happen with time.

Step 2: Start with small details. I clean up the small dust speckles, slowly moving to bigger ones. Start with clothing, background and other details, and approach the skin last, as it needs more attention. In this case, I had to rebuilt part of the white shirt and the suit collar details from scratch.

The primary method here is to use the light and dark settings of the stamp tool. and keep the sample as close as possible to the corrected pixel.

Make sure you work at 100% view or higher. You will miss details if you work at smaller zoom level. Details that will most likely show on your final print.

Perform most major changes on separate or duplicate layers. Save your work often.

Post-Processing:
What I call post processing here is simply the next steps, after the detailed work is done.
Now that the image is clean and all details are present, it’s time to prep it for print.
There are several ways to go about this. Nowadays, I find the method I used to be obsolete, but here it is anyway. At the time of this project, I converted a copy of my file to negative and then outputted the image onto film, using a device that projects digital image on 4×5 format film. Then I proceeded with printing this large negative on photographic black and white Ilford Gallery Grade 3 paper. The result was an outstanding rich black and white print. I then used selenium tone to archive the image. (see below)

Final image

If I were to do this again today, A top of the line Epson ink jet printer with archival ink and paper would probably do the trick, saving me tons of time and money. But back in the day, we did with what we had. Things are just a lot easier and faster now and the potential is even greater.

Here are more examples of retouching assignments:

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