Restoring Old Photos- Spot Healing, Noise Reduction, Adding Colors

Project Description:

Your class project is to Restore old Black and white photos into original form by removing spots and torn out segments of the photo. After that you can reduce the noise and control the Haze in the photo. When you are done with these correction phase, you can add various adjustment layers for Hue, Gradient map, tone curves and more. Later on, you can create masks and add colors to the photo by painting over various portions of the photo.

Materials:

A couple of old photos that need to be restored, Adobe Photoshop for Editing Photo.

Getting Started:

You could follow the steps below for this project-

1. Take a digital or scanned copy of an old black and white photo

2. Open Photoshop and Use selection tool and crop the photo to remove whitespace. Create a duplicate copy of this photo or change it to smart object for Non-destructive editing.

3. Use Spot Healing brush for removing damps and torn from photo, change the size of brush as you need

4. Use camera raw filter for noise reduction. Move to detailed option and increase the value of Luminance to remove grains from the photo

5. Create a Tone curves adjustment layer for haze reduction and changing the values of Light, Dark, Highlights and Shadows. Try to make a S-curve.

6. Next, you can create adjustment layers for Hue or Gradient map to paint over various segments of the photo. For Example- Paint Blue color on the clothes, Skin color over face, etc

7. Repeat the process of painting colors over the remaining segments of the photo.

8. Revert back to any step if you find any error otherwise just save your work and compare with original photo.

Now you are familiar with Image restoration process, you can use this skill to restore more photos and bring back life to faded old photos!

Sharing Your Work:

You can share your final work and progress shots with the class by uploading to the "Your Project" section. If you have any questions or need more tips, please let me know! I'm happy to help!

Petergaye Walcott

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