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16 Jun 04 - 09:06 PM (#1209010) Subject: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Rapparee I have come into possession of a number of family photos, dating from about 1880 to the presnt. They were found under a pile of decaying trash, and some have become stuck together, picture side to picture side. In one case, it's B&W stuck to color. Moreover, many of them have "black mold" on them, and possibly other mold as well. So far, I've been able to gently seperate some of the photos by a gentle misting with distilled water and gentle pulling. Others -- well, they seem to be welded. Any ideas on seperating these photos? And how to treat the mold? (I can scan them and recover pictures from many, if not most, and I can send others to someone who can restore them even further. And yes, I'd like very, very much to recover as many as I can.) |
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16 Jun 04 - 09:35 PM (#1209018) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Stilly River Sage There are photo studios that will restore them but I don't know about unsticking them. Check with a university special collection department in your area. My cousin had a photo of my grandmother in a box in her basement and it was damaged by water when her hot water heater burst. It was very expensive to restore, but they did it. SRS |
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16 Jun 04 - 09:44 PM (#1209022) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Rapparee Also, there are photos that have been rolled since about 1945 and earlier. Any suggestions for unrolling them without cracking? Thanks, SRS. I'll do that. |
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16 Jun 04 - 11:37 PM (#1209065) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Stilly River Sage Same answer--ask the professionals who approach this kind of brittle collection on a regular basis. If you don't know how to do it yourself, leave it alone or you may crack it beyond repair. (But you've probably already figured that out, resourceful librarian that you are!) There is a series of photo shops I think called Maisel that was recommended in the Seattle area for solving this kind of problem. That was years ago. I think there was one in Arizona also. Anyway, it's a name and I posted a link to the search. SRS |
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17 Jun 04 - 12:38 AM (#1209099) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Liz the Squeak If you are in the UK, I'd recommend giving the Bradford Museum of Photography & Film a ring. They know everything there is to know about preserving and restoring photos. Go to their site and put 'restoration' in search - you'll get huge amounts of bibliographies and some advice. For the rolled ones, it's a long and boring process. We had this problem in the museum I worked in, regimental photos that were about 2ft long and had been rolled since WWI! We were told to put them in a safe environment (no damp, no excess heat/humidity, no strong light, no draughts), and carefully, using acid free tissue to protect the surface, to push the rolls out, making them slightly fatter each day. Once they reached a certain stage (fatter than they were wide) and sure they weren't sticking, then we could carefully unroll them from the middle and weigh them down with an inert item - we used linen cloth bags full of rice - so that you unrolled them gently scroll fashion. Move the bags of rice outwards slowly and then when fully unrolled, carefully turn over and flatten out with more tissue protecting and more rice bags. It took ages, but the results were very good. We only lost one photo this way, and that was because some git took his tea into the library (strictly forbidden!!) and it got warm and wet. The tighter the original roll, the harder it is to unravel. Patience and a very long table you don't use for more than 3 days a year is vital! Oddly enough, it was the more modern ones (1950-1970's) photos we had most trouble with - something about the emulsion that broke down quicker and got decidedly sticky. Good luck! LTS |
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17 Jun 04 - 11:33 AM (#1209175) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Stilly River Sage I can believe that about the sticky emulsion, Liz--photos that come today are often already stuck to themselves if the camera dept. tech had damp hands when they packaged them. SRS |
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17 Jun 04 - 01:22 PM (#1209257) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Rapparee I asked my brother, who used to run a photo store and even now knows lots about photography. He said about photos that are stuck together at the emulsion side, "Good luck. You're going to lose some of the picture no matter what you do." When I told him one of the photos was of him, he said the same thing. The rolled photos are those of units my father served in in WW2, and another of his Triple-C company during the '30s. |
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17 Jun 04 - 02:54 PM (#1209351) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Stilly River Sage One thing to remember about photos is that they are processed in liquid chemcials and rinsed in clear water. Depending on how rolled up they are and how much you're willing to experiment, you could try soaking some of the stuck ones for a little while to see if they become unstuck. Photograph paper can tolerate water (I'm sure there's a limit to this, but can't tell you what that might be, so don't go away for a week and come to see what happened with them!) SRS |
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17 Jun 04 - 03:49 PM (#1209401) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Rapparee That was the tack I took to unstick the photos. Most came loose with gentle misting with distilled water and very gentle pulling. One group, however, would not: these were B&W stuck to a color photo. I soaked them in distilled water overnight and this morning they came loose, although some did loose some surface emulsion. Fortunately, the emulsion that was lost was not (except in one case) in a critical area. The one loss that I suffered was in the a photo of my mother; her face was lost and I could do nothing about it. I've dried the photos on a bed of soft paper towels. What saddens me is the first, these photos were treated as they were and, secondly, that undoubtedly some were lost when the room was cleaned out. But at least they were saved, and I can now take steps to preserve them and share them with the family. |
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17 Jun 04 - 04:06 PM (#1209409) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: JohnInKansas I've just been through a similar exercise with cleaning out the "archives" of a family member who died. Of course, everyone wanted a copy of every picture, but in most cases there were only bits and pieces of any of them. A dozen or so scrapbooks (easy) and a 36 gallon cardboard shipping drum 3/4 full of "loose parts." The oldest pictures are, of course, the most "touchy" about any restoration of the original. Many of those before 1910 or so used strange emulsions, and sometimes bizarre chemical combinations. They were often "bonded" to or sometimes printed directly on backing materials that tend to resemble bone more than wood or paper after a few years have worked them over. The gelatin (if that's what the emulsion was) often resembles sand grains. Straightening (flattening) these, if they're significantly warped, may be all but impossible even with the best of archival restoration equipment. For these old ones, about the best that can be done is to roll them around on a good scanner, take lots of pictures from as many angles as you can get without trying to flatten them, and then cut and piece the different "views" back together. The distortions due to not being flat can be "warped out" by editing in the digital version. A digital camera in a good "studio" setup can sometimes work better than scanning, but takes a lot more skill. Depending on your time, patience, and inclination, available software makes it likely that you can do your own "digital reconstruction" of those that can be scanned - even if you have to scan in little bits and pieces and patch them back together. Dirt, scratches, and even mold patches can be fairly easily "removed" from the image, and color fading can be "adjusted out" to get color pictures that may sometimes be better than the originals probably were when new. Even "unprintable" old negatives can (sometimes) be scanned and inverted into usable pictures. If you consider trying some of your own restorations, by all means consult the best qualified professionals you can find to help you decide which ones you might try to do and which ones should be left to them. Very old pictures that are even slightly warped are probably theirs. Those stuck-together ones probably need a sterile humidification chamber that you don't have. Given the costs I've seen for pro jobs, the $$$$ values may have a strong influence for most other images. There are a number of very good programs for photo processing, and most have very good automatic or at least semi-automated routines for salvaging camera errors, but restoration is a different game. My own very personal opinion is that the only program that fills the bill here is Photoshop Elements 2.0 (about $70 US) unless you can perhaps afford a recent version of Photoshop itself (about $900? US). You will need to use some non-automatic features to do good restorations, and will save yourself a lot of pain and suffering by getting a good reference on what to do. I can recommend The Photoshop Elements book for digital photographers by Scott Kelby, New Riders Publishing, ©2004, ISBN 0-7357139-2-8 (about $35 US). (I wish I'd had the book during the first thousand hours I worked on my restorations.) If you have the inclination to try doing at least some of your own restorations, be advised that you will suffer some eye strain, you'll likely fill all available drive space with scans in various stages of restoration, and you'll get incredibly bored with fixing another picture of old aunt Maudy (the ugly one); but it is rewarding when you get the results that are fairly easily accessible with a little patience. As commented above, the roll film pictures that are stuck together may be at least partially "unrollable" if soaked in plain water, but if you have any mold/mildew, the soaking may promote additional growth. Pictures stuck emulsion-to-emulsion seldom separate cleanly, but often you can "lift" the bits and pieces of emulsion that stick to the "wrong side" and scan and reassemble the pieces in digital editing. This is incredibly time-consuming, though, and is usually prohibitively expensive unless you're willing to do it yourself. If you can find an archivist/restorer with some experience (and maybe even equipment) you should get an opinion before trying to soak them yourself. The very old photos, especially those on "thick board" backing, generally do not respond well to attempts to "rehumidify" them. You do need to establish the "mind set" that "restoring" old photos usually does not mean "making the original like new." In some cases it is possible to "clean up" the original; but results are limited. For most professional services, "restoring" means copying the image from the original, and making a new picture that "looks just like the old one did when new." In cases of severe damage, it is sometimes helpful to be able to "inflict additional damage" to the original (as in letting it break to get it flat, perhaps) in controlled ways to get the best possible image. Most such "procedures" cannot be undone, so you must have a plan, and be confident of what can be undone in the digital image, before you start doing them. John |
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18 Jun 04 - 09:10 AM (#1209832) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Rapparee JiK, After I found Photoshop Elements 1.0, I bought 2.0. I also have Photoshop 6 available to me, but (usually) Elements does all that I ask of it. I've also taken a class on P6. I didn't know of the book, but it's on order now! The mildewed photos I'm going to scan and then see what a restorer can do. Living in high desert, humidity over 50% is unusual and any water I've used on the photos has evaporated pretty darn quick. Earlier, we had a photo taken two weeks before Pearl Harbor which had the right half "gone to white." After scanning and enhancement, the photo of my Aunt Helen appeared as a ghostly, but recognizable, image. I sent it to my Uncle, and he said that he remembered the day very well -- it was the day he proposed to her, and my father had taken the picture. Since Aunt Helen has been dead for the last fifteen years, you can imagine.... It's for reasons like that that I want to do this project. And I took only the photos most in need of immediate help; there are at least two hundred more back in Illinois awaiting lovingcare. My computer is a Gateway with 160 GB HDD, with 512 MB RAM. There's an HP 4570c scanner attached. My wife's computer is a Dell, 60 GB, 512 RAM, with a Canon scanner. Both scanners are at the upper end of middle and can do negatives and slides as well as photo positives. Both computers have CD burners and Elements 2.0 is on both. In addition, each machine has a ZIP drive of at least 100 MB. Drive space/data storage we got! Thanks for the information. It's always best to hear from someone who's been down the road already. It really is. |
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18 Jun 04 - 11:40 AM (#1209917) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: JohnInKansas Rapaire - I had a couple of rather large framed photos, 1890s vintage, badly warped and impossible to straighten, one with a 5 inch long (x 1/2 inch wide at one end) crack through the middle of it. Either of them would have been impossible to fit on my scanner (8.5 x 14 inch) even if they'd been flat enough to lay down, so I had to scan in pieces and then fit the hunks together. The one with the rip took 8 separate scans (at about 245 MB each) to get the pieces, and of course "in-process" partial assemblies, and a few "startovers" ate up almost 5 GB, just for that one picture, while it was being worked. I was pretty conservative, and scanned all the pieces of the one with the rip at 1200 dpi, since I intended to print back at 13 x 19 inches (my printers maximum), and I figured it's better to have pixels to throw away rather than come up short. With the patching and pasting, I suspect 600 dpi would have been good enough, but I don't think I'd have gotten the results I did with anything less than 600. (For snapshots, I almost never use higher than 300 dpi in scanning, sometimes less.) Saved as Photoshop's native .psd files, the few hundred photos I worked filled 48 CDs. The "reassembled" largest one was "only" about 218 MB (.psd) when I got done, and prints nicely enough at 8x10 from a 60 KB .jpg for the "distant relatives." (Only the close ones got the really good prints.) Once the "fixin's" done, of course, you can always save in a smaller file format - I used a medium resolution .jpg to cut final file sizes to about 1/10 of the "working size." With the continual stream of "suggestions" from the family, though, I didn't dare throw out the original scans and quite a bit of the in-process stuff until I was sure everbody was satisfied (which may happen in a few years?????) If you get Kelby's book, you'll want to take a good look at his "better methods" for exposure correction, color correction, his dodge and burn technique(s), and some of the stuff on straightening (and bending - to fit pieces together). There are automated fixes in PE2 for most of it, but his stuff really does work a lot better. I've pulled usable, if not beautiful, images off of prints that showed no visible image by scanning the solid black print and using his screen layer overlays. (Flash failure at a street jam at 2 am at a festival. One street light 45 yards away.) For restoration, the "clone tool" is magic. Any other method of wiping out large blemishes always changes the texture, and the "flat" correction will always show up in the print. You can usually clone an adjacent area that has the same texture on top of the blem and make them just disappear. You'll have fun. John |
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18 Jun 04 - 11:57 AM (#1209928) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Stilly River Sage If you're going to do all of that work, then I would recommend saving those files as PNGs or TIFFs. JPGs are "lossy," meaning that every time you save one the program does some averaging between the neighboring pixels and the display loses some of it's clarity or resolution. PNG, GIF, and TIFF are all stable. GIF doesn't use very many colors, so is only a good choice in images that don't require much color variation. I have a good book that explains the differences between these, it's at home, so I'll post it later. Since that book came out PNGs have become very popular in the Macromedia Suite (the Dreamweaver and Flash folks). So opening a PNG file might default to one of those programs, though all browsers should open them. They compress much better than other image files. There is a program in use here at UTA for when they "stitch together" segmented scans of large historic maps. I'll ask what the program is called. I know about it (I've seen the computer humming away at work back in Special Collections) but I've never used it. SRS |
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18 Jun 04 - 02:03 PM (#1210016) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: JohnInKansas Since Rapaire has inticated he intends to work in Photoshop or Photoshop elements, the "lossless" format of choice is the Photoshop "native" .psd. It's a perfectly satisfactory format for archiving, and gives about the same filesize as a .bmp, but with a lot more retained information. (A file with many layers can be saved as .psd, and recovered with the layers still intact and separated. Saving as a .bmp or .tif nearly always "flattens" the layers.) The .tif format actually comes in at least 7 different "flavors" in the standard, and many programs (Adobe is notorious) apply additional "features" so that the .tif format is not predictably "portable" between programs. (A .tif produced in Adobe Illustrator may not be directly openable even in other Adobe graphics programs. You often have to intall an import filter and perform an "import AI .tif".) If I recall, the .png format is a Kodak thing, and while quite a few "snapshot editing" programs will handle it, it's not directly usable for much except printing snapshots from Kodak licensed print programs. (I'd have to check notes to be sure that's the format I've run into quite a few problems with.) The .gif format is "sort of" lossless, but isn't appropriate for color photographs. It can only display 7 (?) colors, and each .gif file is supposed to (but sometimes doesn't) include a statement that says which colors to use. It's okay for b/w or simple color lineart, but is not a very good choice for anything with continuous tone variations. It's lossless, in that you can re-save it repeatedly without losing anything, but you have to throw away a lot of information to make it the first time. As a side "feature," a .gif that indexes to colors significantly different than the inks in your personal "7-color photo printer" may make really lousy prints, and it's very difficult to correct for. The key is to save your original scan - or whatever source you have, and then never save it again and never make changes directly to it. You can copy it as many times as you want. Work on a copy, in a lossless format, and when done archive the lossless "edited master" and make whatever other files you need from it (or from a "working copy"). The .jpg format can be compressed or not, and if you use a "high resolution .jpg" there's very little, if any, loss of information. Photoshop Elements allows you to select 10 separate levels of compression for .jpg, each in 3 different .jpg "modes." At the 2 or 3 highest .jpg resolutions (minimum compression) a .jpg file is likely to be about 30% larger than the uncompressed bitmap or .psd. Most snapshot editing programs allow only compressed .jpg saves, and generally compress like the 3 or 4 "lowest resolution" (most compression) settings in PE2. These can be extremely lossy if you save repeatedly. Many professional photographers do use .jpg format for routine touchups; but they work from a copy of the archived original, open the copy once and make all the changes, and then save back to a high res .jpg. Lower resolution (lossy compressed) .jpg files can then be made from their edited high res file. Most .jpg files you find on the web are compressed at one of the 3 or 4 lowest quality settings (highest compression) available in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, often with resizing and reduction in pixel density before the compression and save. Many of the photo editing programs available allow little choice about how to save, and generally use these compression levles. Editing in another (lossless) format is a necessary measure with them. For something as "labor intensive" as restoration of old photos, using a "re-saveable" format is definitely in order, and you would normally save/archive the "final" version in the same format in which you worked. John |
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18 Jun 04 - 03:44 PM (#1210066) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Rapparee Last week I had to download and open digital photos from an old Kodak camera at work. They were in fpx (FlashPix) format, and Elements won't open it. Neither would any other imaging program on the machine. Very fortunately, there was a copy of Adobe Photo House 3.0 on a CD in the camera box. And that would handle fpx format. I downloaded the pix, and saved them to .jpg -- good enough for what we needed at work. I then reset the camera to take pictures in jpeg.... |
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18 Jun 04 - 11:48 PM (#1210253) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: JohnInKansas Several of the fairly popular digital cameras have used proprietary file formats as their default for saving the pictures, but .jpg is pretty much the accepted format among pro/am and professional users, and most cameras can be reset to save as .jpg. If you really want all the bits, the high-dollar cameras allow you to save as .bmp, but the files can be huge. Saving as .bmp is the only format that recovers and saves "everything that the camera recorded." Many cameras allow you to choose a "normal" .jpg, with considerable compression, or a "hi-res" .jpg which has little compression. The difference with my wimpy little 2 MP camera is 32 KB for the normal and about 700 KB for the hi-res. The 32 KB should print quite nicely at snapshot size, 4" x 6" or so, and makes "passable" 5 x 7 prints without additional "workup," but you do need more pixels for larger prints. In theory, the hi-res 700 KB should make a "reasonably good" print (72 dpi on the paper) up to about 16 x 22 inches with no (or very little) editing. (With a little work, a 300 KB .jpg can usually be "worked up" to print at 600" x 900" or larger, but who needs that may billboards? Blowing up to this scale to extract a small detail is another matter, though.) The .png file format is not the Kodak one that I'd had problems with, so I apologize for the misidentification. It's a format that was developed to replace the .gif compression, and is apparently a pretty good format with respect to picture fidelity, but does appear to have some problems with portability between programs. The only "living major" application that's really equipped to handle it (based on my look at the list at the PNG website) is CorelDraw!. Canvas and a couple of "PhotoDraw" (bundled editing programs) used it and died. Like .jpg, you can choose a compression level (in some programs) and if you choose to not recompress you could make repeated saves without losing addional pixels. If you recompress at each save, I would expect losses similar to those with .jpg, although that may not be quite a "true picture" of the format's abilities. The original conversion to .png may, or may not, truncate pixel information, depending on program and settings. If you're starting with a digital photo or scan, the original conversion to .gif truncates the picture information, and discards a lot of it. Once converted, you don't lose additional information when you re-save, but it's not a good format to use during editing. Create a .gif from your final "good" file only when you need a .gif for a specific end use. There are too many "kinds" of .tif files to make sweeping statements, but some .tif conversions discard data during the original conversion to .tif, but (usually) everything saved in the first .tif is saved through subsequent re-saves. If you save at "hi-res" (no compression) levels, .jpg files can be re-saved repeatedly with very little, if any, loss; but the majority of "consumer level" graphic editing programs don't give you the choice. The advice to use a "lossless" format should stil be followed unless you know that the losses, with your program and settings, are acceptable for your purposes. For working in PS or PSE, one would use either the program's native .psd or .bmp while you want to keep all the image information intact. John |
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19 Jun 04 - 08:55 AM (#1210375) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Rapparee I'm scanning and saving in PSD at 600 dpi. I've done higher -- a couple of years ago I saved at 1,200 dpi, but it took forever to save and the resulting files were of the size you can only imagine. I also don't suggest emailing files of this size. Right now I'm playing with some of the scans, tweaking and fooling with the software. Probably by tomorrow evening I'll start getting serious. Already I've recovered two photos, though, simply by moving the photos from yellowed to grayscale. It's not that I don't WANT to start serious work, but I have to recapture some of the skills with PSE and PS6 I had. Haven't really used the programs for over a year. |
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19 Jun 04 - 09:49 AM (#1210396) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: JohnInKansas PSE has some pretty automatic color recovery and color cast removal, but if you can get the Kelby book he has some helpful advice on the subject of color removal. I wouldn't suggest waiting for the book before you see what you can do, of course. It's too much fun to get started. You'll get good results with the obvious methods, but laying on an adjustment layer and resetting saturation back to zero does leave independent adjustment of shadow and highlight densities as an option you don't have as easily with the "canned" conversion straight to grayscale. I'll note that I did most of my own recoveries before I got the book, and I didn't go back and do very many over. It's just that it's even more fun getting great results (especially when there's an easy way) than just getting results. John |
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19 Jun 04 - 01:56 PM (#1210484) Subject: RE: BS: Tech: Rescuing old photographs From: Rapparee My wife, who is currently driving Eastward across Iowa, told me that she bought the book. Pity is, she won't be back until the 28th, so I have to fool around with PSE until then, I guess. Of course, I have her new Honda Element! |