Attempts at Restoration

· by admin

I’ve been slowly making progress on my image assignment.  One of the things I’ve been attempting to do is to restore some images that were part of a scrapbook I scanned while I was working on my masters.  The scrapbook contained magazine and newspaper clippings that were glued onto pages and tied together with some twine.  Unfortunately, after being stored in a closet for seventy plus years the pages are crumbling, the photos are yellowed, and most of the photos have some odd crease in them likely from the glue that was used.  To make matters worse, some of the items in the scrapbook were stuck together with paper clips which then rusted and caused a huge mess.

[caption id=«attachment_643» align=«alignleft» width=«217»]Original Scanned Image Original Scanned Image[/caption]

For a number of reasons which I won’t go into, I couldn’t take the scrapbook with me or disassemble it so I had to resort to scanning.  (I was lucky I even got to do that).  Many of the photos in the scrapbook though are rare and don’t exist elsewhere so they are valuable for my research and should I ever want to use them for a publication or on the web they’ll need a bit of work.

[caption id=«attachment_644» align=«alignright» width=«150»]detail of the damge Detail of damage and pixelation[/caption]

Where I’m stuck though is that they appear pixelated and blurry and for the life of me I can’t seem to remedy this.  The original image was part of an article entitled »Can Beauty be Hand Made?» from _Screenland _in the early 1930s.  The first thing I did was to crop the image to remove the rest of the article and any text.  Even though I used a somewhat high quality scanner (or at least the best scanner that I could easily transport on a roadtrip) and the images were scanned at about 60dpi, the still appear damaged, wrinkled, and almost pixelated (the original image measures something like 5,000x8,000 pixels).  I’m not sure why the image looks the way it does once cropped, but I can’t seem to get it to look smoother.  Maybe this is just something I’ll have to live with and settle for just adjusting the color and editing any small defects.

[caption id=«attachment_641» align=«alignright» width=«300»]Restored Image Restored Image[/caption]

I was able to adjust the color. After playing with the levels and using the auto color and contrast tools, I decided to use an adjustment layer to convert the photo to black and white.  I did this because the original photo was in black and white but because I scanned it in color and the article was already somewhat yellowed the image has yellow tones to it.  I also used the dust and scratches filter with hopes of getting rid of some of the almost grid like pixelation in the image.  It helped some but not nearly what I had hoped for.  Overall, I think image looks better although it’s not what I would have hoped for.  Maybe someone in class will have an idea of how to fix it!