A friend found an old roll of film in her fathers drawer after he passed away. The roll looks to be from the eighties, and we estimate it is at least 30 years old. She decided to have it developed to see what if any memories remained on this relic after all this time. I warned her going in that the longer film sits the less likely there is to be anything remaining, but of course having nothing to lose we decided it was best to do it. The film came out VERY faded, some pictures almost non-existent and others not quite so bad. The fact that it had sat in a dry drawer all these years and not subjected to all kinds of changes in temperature probably was the only reason anything came out. She had them saved to CD because in this current state they are not quite fit to print. I am hopeful that most images can be repaired to a much better state than they are now. I have posted several images below, a few of the absolute worse ones and a few not so bad ones.
What I would like to know is mainly if there is a way to get a good repair on these pictures without rebuilding the channels and hand coloring the images? We are not looking for perfection, we know that will be impossible with these. I would just like to give her something hopefully much better than what she has now. If you think a decent repair will be possible using photoshop cs3 or cs4, what is the best way as you see it? Please ask if you need any additional information.
Thanks so very much for looking and taking time to answer if you can.
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If you use different photoshop techniques it is possible that you can bring some life to those photos.
Last photo
Thanks for the answers thus far. 'abigdorkydimwit' I know these will be difficult to impossible to get perfect, I just want to get something viewable that she can enjoy looking at. 'jaanvar', can you elaborate on the techniques you used for the result you got? I have posted my try at the same image you did. Basically I used the Visual Infinity Grain Surgery 2 plugin to remove as much grain as possible, then did an auto levels adjustment and changed the blend mode to multiply. The image is still a bit dark and I don't know how it will look printed, but it is much better I would say, at least you can look at it and see what it is right away. Let me know what you think. Thanks again and please keep the suggestions coming.
My first try at a restoration
I took a stab using Levels (Auto), adjusting it to 300 dpi without resampling the image (although you could try resampling to get rid of some of the noise, the Dust & Scratches filter, a bit of Curves for contrast/tweaking and a little bit of Variations for color adjustment to a bit more red/yellow.
There are a lot of different tools in photoshop and a lot of different ways you could approach these images. First, is color/contrast, second, would be noise. You just have to play with it.
my attempt
Thanks to all who provided tips and solutions. I went with BongSoo even though he commented last and I had a decent handle on how to approach these images well before he commented. He was still the only one to concisely tell me what he did and show me the outcome. This does not mean that I appreciate anyone else's answer any less, just that I think if I were someone with a similar problem and I stumbled upon this page on Experts Exchange, his answer would be the most helpful. Thanks again to everyone.
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by: aBigDorkyDimwitPosted on 2009-03-20 at 21:41:57ID: 23945972
First of all, these images are pretty low res for any kind of high-quality restoration, and would take some serious work to get rid of grain and artifacts of the color issues... will say that they are not COMPLETELY worthless, just not going to be all the greatest... and if you have higher resolution master files to work from, there wil be slightly better results and would take some serious efforts to get them where you may like to see them.