Digital Photography Restoration
The photo restoration process may be tedious, but actually, it is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to restore the destroyed images.
The customer may bring actual photography (above) or like in this case, only the black and white xerox photocopy (below), or just the scan, digital file to work on.
A photocopy is burdened with many artifacts. Such an image is strongly contrasted, so we do not have the original distribution of values. In addition to damage to the surface, the unevenness of the paper is also visible. Loss of quality requires decisions regarding the full grayscale restoration that would depend on the interpretation of which value represents an original image, and which is distorted, and how to rebuild or restore the most accurate features of photography and remove the artifacts.
Some elements of the original image must be practically recreated, because the preserved state does not allow for relying on the existing image structure.
If there is an original photo and a good-quality scan available, the work focuses on removing damages such as scratches, cracks, dirt.
Another aspect and the next step is the preparation of the cleaned image for reproduction, for a specific type of digital printout.
In the case of recreating the passe-partout, the freedom to replace the existing fragments of the original with a completely edited image is a more justified method. In the example above, the lettering component is the only remaining part of the original frame.
In the example above, the state of the photocopy practically does not provide details of the costumes. The table in the foreground and the details of the dress have been practically 3D modeled to obtain a chiaroscuro rendering of a group of characters.
Also in the example below, all damaged and missing parts of the photo have been recreated based only on the visible fragments. This sample also shows that it is not so much a photocopy of a damaged photograph, but the photocopy itself is submitted in such a severely damaged condition.
