Scraps Of Mind

Photo Restoration for Old or Damaged Photos

Do you have any old family photos from the days before digital cameras (yeah, remember those days?)?

Maybe they’re really old photos from your granny or great-granny’s time and have suffered through the passage of time to look a bit battered and worn now.

How frustrating it is not to be able to create great scrapbooking memories from them just because the quality is so poor.

So I thought we might look at some ways in with you can use your computer and photo editing software to try and fix up these photos and give them a new lease of life.

Damage around the edge of your photos

Many of our really old photos have had a hard life. And it often shows in the dog-eared edges that they have developed over the years.

If the damage around the edges of your photos doesn’t extend too far into the photo, and if the background in this area is not important to the context of your photo, then the easiest way to deal with this is to crop the daggy edges off.

Now before we go any further I need to stress that you should not physically crop your old photos. It is the digital versions that I’m talking about. The digital image you have created after scanning your photo (using some of the tips in 6 Top Tips to Photo Restoration with Your Scanner).

The instructions in this article are based on Photoshop Elements but all good photo editing software programs will have similar tools and functions

• Load your scanned photo into your photo editing software
• Select the Crop Tool from your tool bar and drag the mouse across the part of the image that you want to retain in your restored photo.
• Release the mouse button and click on the accept check mark to crop your photo.

Dark and Gloomy

Often your old photos will actually grow darker with age as the black ink on your black and white prints starts to ‘take over’.

It’s important to try to fix as much of this as you can at the scanning stage as described in my earlier article on  using your scanner to help with photo restoration.

By adjusting the lighting with your scanner you can capture much more detail and you will be able to further improve on this using your photo editing software. If you don’t make this adjustment at the scanning stage then this detail will be lost and no matter what else you do, you won’t be able to get it back.

Once you’ve scanned in your photo, play around with the lighting, shadows and highlights functions and also with the brightness and contrast as I described in More Tips for Photo Restoration.

Here’s how to lighten up those dark and gloomy looking photos:

Read the rest of this entry »

More Tips for Photo Restoration

If you’re anything like me you’ll remember all the occasions where you found yourself with the definitive photo of that special occasion. But the photo was not really of the best quality.

Perhaps it was under or over exposed, maybe it was a bit too fuzzy.

Well in this article we’ll look at how you can improve that photo so that it can take pride of place in your scrapbook layout.

To apply these tips you will need a good photo editing software program. I use Photoshop Elements but there are many others around that you can use, and they generally have similar functions although they may call the tools by slightly different names.

Once you’ve scanned the photo into your computer, open it up in your photo editing software program.

The first thing I always do is make a duplicate of the photo and work on the duplicate. It just saves having to repeat the scan if your restoration goes pear shaped and you have to start again.

Adjusting the lighting

And my second step is always to adjust the lighting.

In Photoshop Elements this function is found by clicking on the top menu bar Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Levels… This will open a dialog box featuring a black histogram (or black mountain as I like to call it).

All you need to do is to grab the black triangle underneath the mountain and move it to the right so it sits at the beginning of the mountain slope and then do the same for the white triangle, moving it to the left. In this example the white triangle would not need to be moved.

This will optimise the lighting range or exposure for your photo and will make a big difference. You can further tweak this by moving the grey triangle in the middle until you get a result you are happy with.

If your photo still looks too dark or too light, you can go into Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Shadows and Highlights which will often give your photo a ‘lighting lift’. And you can adjust the brightnes and contrast in Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Brightness And Contrast.

I use all these functions on a regular basis as I am not a good photographer and they help to compensate for my photography skills. So they’re not just for older photos.

But the secret is always Less is More. Make all your adjustments very gradually. And it’s always a good idea to keep going back to your original photo to comare how you’re going. In fact I usually make each change on a duplicate layer so I can easily compare and make sure that I am using this power for good and not evil.

Removing dust and scratches

If your photo has some really significant blemishes, this is not the technique to use. We will look at fixing those sort of problems in the third article on photo restoration (stay tuned folks).

But if your photo just has some light scratches or some small specks of dust, these can easily be removed by using the Dust and Scratches Filter found under Filter>Noise>Dust&Scratches in Photoshop Elements.

Now you should be aware that this filter works by blurring your photo slightly which disguises any light scratches or dust specks by bluring them into their surrounds. So you don’t want to apply this with a heavy hand or you will end up with a dust free blurry photo.

To get the best out of this filter you might like to try this: Read the rest of this entry »

Do you Customize your Drop Shadows?

…or do you just leave them as the default?

Did you know that you can change the look of your drop shadows in your graphics editing program?

It’s very simple and frankly, I think it makes all the difference to your digital scrapbook layout. Anyone who is part of my Step by Step Digital Scrapbook Mentoring Program will know how much I love to customize my shadows. I think it makes for a more authentic look for the shadows. And sometimes (especially for titles) it can be a funky way of giving the text and extra color boost.

What do I mean?

Well when you click on any drop shadow in your Styles Pallet your graphics editing program will apply a shadow that’s a standard size and distance from your element and is black with a level of opacity reduction to make it look gray.

But in real life, shadows are not all gray. they take on the tone of the item that they are shadowing. And by the way, I’m not talking about the shadows thrown by the sun on the ground. I’m talking about the small shadows that surround an object if you put it on a surface. Look at the shadow of an object sitting on a table and you’ll see what I mean. I’m looking at an envelope sitting on my desk as I write this, and the shadow thrown on the desk is brown, not black or gray.

If you click on the layout above, you’ll see what I mean.

And the good news is that in most good editing programs you can control the parameters of your drop shadow.

So how do I do it?

I use Photoshop Elements 5 but the principles for doing this will remain true for PSP or CS I would think, although the terminology might be different. So here’s how you can customize the drop shadows in your own layouts.

• First activate your element layer in the Layers Pallet and then select a shadow from your Styles Pallet and click to apply it to your element.

• Now double click on the little ’sun’ or circle’ icon at the right of its layer in the Layers Pallet.

• You are presented with a Style Settings dialog box that allows you to play with the size of the shadow, the distance it sits away from your element and it’s opacity. You can vary these parameters by using the slider bars or by typing pixel sizes directly into the appropriate fields in the dialog box.

• You can also customize the colors of your shadows to match the color of your element or to create a funky effect. To customize the color of your shadow do this (note: this feature is not available in PSE4.
  • Click on the small color swatch box to the right of the size parameter in your Style Settings box.
  • The color picker box will open and you can move your mouse over your layout (it will turn into an eyedropper) and click on an area of your element which is the colour you want for your shadow.
  • You can click in the Color Picker to choose variations on this if you like and when you’re satisfied, click OK.
  • Note: For the most authentic look, always choose a darker tone of the color for your shadows.

• By playing with the Opacity slider in the Style Settings box you can make the shadow lighter or darker.

• When you have the shadow look you want click OK.

It’s as easy as that. And your shadows will look a lot more realistic.

A note to users of PSE versions earlier than 5. You don’t have the ability ot change the color of your drop shadows in these earlier versions. When I used PSE4 I used to make a duplicate of the element and apply the shadow to the lower layer. Then I reduced the opacity of that layer so that shadow would look softer.

Don’t forget, you can also use this technique to go to the other end of the scale and make your shadow totally unrealistic by picking a contrasting color, just to spice up your title a bit. This can be a very cool look for your title and I often use this technique in my Word Art for the Weekly Word Art Newsletter (see the top of this page to subscribe to this free newsletter).

I hope you find this scrapbooking tip useful. And if you did, why not share it with other scrapbookers by telling them about this article (you are very welcome to link to the article), or Stumbling it, bookmarking it in Delicious or giving it a vote on Kirtsy.

So back to the original question: do you customize you drop shadows? Leave a comment and let us know.