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If you spend any amount of time working to restore the appearence of old
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photographs, you're going to run into some challenges.
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Some photos that are particularly damamged and need a lot of work.
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In any situation, when you're working on an older image, it can be helpful to have
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a strategy, but that's especially important when it comes to images that
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need quite a bit of effort to make them look their best.
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I often joke that if you ask me how much it would cost to restore a photo, I
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wouldn't really be able to give you an estimate in terms of hours, or dollars,
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instead I'd ask you how much you wanted to spend, and I'd work until I had
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exhausted that budget. And what I mean by that is that in many
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cases I could keep working on an old photo forever.
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Every time I clean up some little blemish, I'm going to find something else
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that could be improved. Therefore, in many cases, it can be
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helpful to figure out what are the priorities for a photo?
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What are the most important corrections that you want to apply?
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Let's take a look at this image for example, it certainly needs a lot of
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work, but I think, right off the bat I would prioritize cropping the image
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because I don't need to have this outer frame, and then I would start to think
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about some of the blemishes. But I would prioritize those.
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I would focus on cleaning up the blemishes on the face and also in the
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background because those are very distracting.
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But some of the other blemishes, for example, on the drum or on the uniform of
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the soldier here. I might let those go.
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I might not worry too much about fixing those unless I feel that the photo is
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very important and I have the time to spend on improving all of those details.
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I would also want to darken up the bottom portion of the image because this faded
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area is a little bit distracting. The point is that I'm going to prioritize
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the corrections that'll apply to any photograph.
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I'll consider how important the image is, how distracting some of those blemishes
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are, and how much time I'm willing to spend, to make an image look its best.
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The key is to have a thoughtful strategy. To not just haphazardly move around from
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one correction to another, but to think about the approach you'll take for a
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particular image, and then follow that plan as you work to improve the photo.