Countless people and institutions have colour negatives and Polaroids that are slowly fading to a muddy uniform mist. All it takes to bring them back to life is a scanner and some good scanner software. We'll show you how you can go back to the old lustre by using a 64-bit TIFF digital negative made off an inexpensive Epson Perfection V700 Photo.
We made two types of scans for this story. First we scanned some old Kodak negatives to HDRi files. Each scanned negative resulted in a file of approximately 40 MB. It’s important not to make these scans too big in order not to grind your Mac Pro to a halt. The scanned files turned out to be about 2600 x 2500 pixels in size.
The second type of scan we made were Polaroids that we still had lying around in a dark shoebox. Although the environment we kept them in for years was almost perfect, especially with regards to moisture, temperature and light, the Polaroids had faded to a blurry and muddy amalgam of coloured areas; the portrait they were supposed to depict hardly recognizable after all these years.
We scanned these in 48-bit HDR colour to get the most out of the prints.
Starting with the prints, we first corrected the histogram in order to get some of the colours back to their original brightness. That introduced a severe colour cast, which you can easily get rid of in SilverFast products by using the Remove Color Cast slider—LaserSoft Imaging, the developers of SilverFast, won a colour management award in 2009, so they know what they’re doing. It’s also one of the main reasons why I find them superior to the competition.
To see what I mean, consider the Before/After shot of a print taken with a compact camera in 1967 below (click the image to see it bigger in its own new window).
You’ll notice a lot of scratches on the result, and that is because iSRD doesn’t work on prints. To get the print in near-perfect condition, you’ll have to retouch in Photoshop after having exported a version off your 48-bit scan. For prints and Polaroids, the result that you see in the example above is about as good as it will get if you don’t want to spend more time than absolutely necessary.
It took me a quarter of an hour to get the above result, which I consider to be fair, considering the quality of the original was below average—remember, this was taken with a compact camera of the sixties, with a lens to match!
Restoring a negative
If you’re working with a Polaroid print, the results can be even better if the print itself hasn’t been damaged too much by scratches. With a good condition Polaroid print, the main problem will be the colour fading. The colour cast removal tool combined with the Adaptive Color Restoration (ACR) tool give results you couldn’t imagine, as you can see from the Before/After shots below. This restoration took me 4 minutes—it was almost routine.
Restoring a negative is even easier, because you can apply iSRD to get rid of the dust and scratches, saving you a trip to Photoshop in most cases. Using iSRD, colour cast removal and Adaptive Color Restoration (ACR) on a negative, you can revive colour photographs from 60 years back to pristine condition, all depending on the equipment with which they were taken, of course.
Doing little more than clicking the iSRD button in addition to the adjustments I already described, the below gives a good idea of what I could come up with in 6 minutes time. Pay extra attention to the large dust—or is it a scratch?—speckle in the top right corner and the scratches covering the wall behind the persons in the shot.
Finally, using the same simple tools, you can even force a negative that was completely overblown to show what was on it. I actually did this for fun and more out of curiosity than anything else, but as you can see it is amazing what you can get out of an overblown negative that the lab in 1965 didn’t care to develop. Again, using the same three tools as before, I was able to see what would have been on this photo if the lab had developed it.
The black area is the original, so imagine what you could get out of a negative that is not completely over exposed, using that “simple scanner” and scanner software that is capable of getting the last drop of technical capability out of that scanner.
Production environments
In a production environment like a photographer’s studio, a museum or any other environment where old negatives need to be digitized, the benefits of using a HDRi file as a start to create restored versions are:
- The HDRi file serves as a negative that contains all the image data the scanner can detect;
- Even with an inexpensive “consumer-type” scanner like the Epson Perfection V700 Photo, the data that can be extracted from a negative is incredibly complete and ‘deep’
- The restorations that you perform are really versions of the same negative;
- The restorations are non-destructive;
- The scanned digital negative—the HDRi file—is kept untouched;
- As technology improves, the negative is still available to perform adjustments that may be even better than what is possible today;
- With only three tools, a damaged and “worn out” negative can be brought back to life.
