Photo Restoration | I Restored 26 Presidents With Photoshop, Here's Why!

so I recently worked to restore and color the 26 US presidents whose likenesses were only photographed in black and white in this video I'm going to explain why I decided to do this rather time-consuming task I'll also talk about the restoration and colorization processes from a technical point of view and give my overall thoughts on the entire project and what I learned from it so I like to try and work on a fairly broad range of photographs for colorization and therefore always glad to receive suggestions on which topics or people I should cover in the future I noticed that I had been receiving multiple requests to colorize an image of Abraham Lincoln so I did the completed picture was quite well received online getting over 12,000 duck votes on reddit for example now as much as I love upvotes who doesn't it was actually the comments both on reddit and elsewhere which were the most rewarding and informative part of posting that image multiple times I received basically the same comment saying that this colorization had allowed the common ters to see lincoln as a fully real human for the first time now that thought really stuck with me and also made me realize just how many important historical people have now become no more than a monochromatic face in a history book for the most part I've typically tried to focus on coloring the more social history side of history as I fell everyday life was generally less well highlighted than major historical persons and events that Lincoln picture taught me that there's actually a real merit to trying to make these more immediately significant historical people more relatable to a modern audience this was the main driving force behind my decision to color every single president so I'm not going to go through every single president I worked on in this video partially because the video would be incredibly long also because I'd repeat myself a lot in terms of my working processes and finally because I already made a video where I showed off all the final images what I will do is take you through a representative selection of those I worked on which between them will allow me to cover all the various challenges I ran into throughout the project John Quincy Adams was the sixth President of the United States he was also the first of America's family based dynastic presidents being the son of the second president John most notably for me however he was the first president to be photographed earlier photographs such as this one which was created in 1843 have the potential to have become quite badly damaged over time while every photograph I worked on required at least some restoration the earlier one certainly presented the largest repair problems to solve the intention that I had to put all these pictures together in a final video also made the fact that most of the earlier ones were heavily damaged quite personally discouraging in restoring pictures there's only ever so much that you can do to repair them certainly while retaining original details so when restoring heavily damaged photographs they're never going to look as clean as the photographs which started in perfect original condition do I always knew that the first five presidents in my completed video were going to be paintings which were bright clean and perfectly presented I therefore also knew that for someone watching the video they would move from a finely detailed painting of the fifth u.s. President James Monroe - my best attempt at restoring this photograph of John Quincy Adams which would never be able to compare to it visually due to just how much damage the photograph had incurred over time as it turns out I'm reasonably happy with this final restoration and colorization while I don't feel it holds up as well as some of the president's restored from glass plate negatives for example I think I was able to achieve my primary goal of trying to bridge the gap between when this picture was taken in the 1800s and the present day as much as I had issues with this restoration compared to John Quincy Adams immediate successor as president this photograph was remarkably simple to work with so this photographic daguerreotype of Andrew Jackson was the most damaged picture I've ever had to restore now I didn't have to use this picture another photograph was taken at this same photographic session and this other one is admittedly in better condition unfortunately since my goal for this project was first and foremost to help people connect with these historical faces I wanted the presidents to be posed facing the camera and therefore audience and not them sitting in a side profile for that reason I was rather stuck with using this incredibly damaged yet front-facing picture as the base for my Andrew Jackson restoration initially I tried to restore it using much the same techniques as I would with any photograph primarily using Photoshop Healing Brush tools I quickly realized however that in doing so I would be pretty much just painting entirely new and non accurate detail in Photoshop saline brush tools rely on sampling information from a non damaged part of the image and in the case of this image non damaged parts barely exist now just when I was about to give up on this photograph and go with the side profile view instead something occurred to me while I'd been searching for photographs of Andrew Jackson I also discovered this engraving which was created using the original pre damaged photograph for reference upon overlaying the corresponding engraving to my damaged photograph I discovered that this reproduction was remarkably faithful and would be a good image source for replacing damaged elements of the photograph for where the engraver had taken some creative license mostly to make Andrew Jackson appear less old it seems I use the liquify tool in Photoshop to make the engraved features better match the faint details still visible in the damaged photograph obviously I can't be sure that the details that I used from the engraving now missing in the photograph are 100% correct that being said the reproduction engraving of this photograph was created by someone who saw and copied the non damaged version who likely held it in their hand so it's about as good a source as it would be possible to find for how it originally looked for me I'm always really fascinated by historically produced reproductions which exist in a better condition to the original it's like the Roman statues which were reproduced from plaster casts during the Victorian age and sent to the museums around the world now the originals which were stuck outside have been damaged by acid rain and the plaster cast reproductions are in some ways the more historically accurate version as they retain details which the true carved versions have since lost it raises the question of what is a historical document the physical object is so or the information it's transmitting to the viewer I'm quite happy with how this picture looks now it's not quite a photograph anymore or an engraving but I also feel it may be one of the most accurate depictions of Andrew Jackson's true likeness that now exists let's jump ahead now to the 18th president ulysses s grant and from some really tough restorations to a surprisingly easy one sometimes you can't really be sure just how well you'll be able to restore a photograph until you actually start despite really liking this picture from a composition and expression point of view I was quite worried that it appeared to be overexposed being a glass negative and not either a daguerreotype or a print I knew that there would be quite a lot of potential to adjust the contrast in this image however I was genuinely really shocked at just how much detail was stored within this negative from a colouring point of view it's really essential to try and bring as much detail and contrast out in your black and white image as possible before you even start coloring the major difference between real life and photography in my opinion is generally higher dynamic range which occurs in real life but less so in photography dynamic range is broadly the potential levels of contrast and image can have even if you're not familiar with high dynamic range as a concept you'll have likely seen HDR images produced by cameras which show extra levels of detail within a photograph now photographers usually avoid HDR for portraits as it highlights flaws on people's skin and broadly speaking portraits are usually meant to be flattering however it's the removal of these flaws I feel which make someone a portrait and not a person again my purpose and method when coloring pictures is always to try and remove some of the artificial nature of the photography session and make the sitter into the person they were outside of the photography studio therefore I always adjust my contrast to try and bring out more of those freckles hair follicles and other small human imperfections to help people more easily make a connection with these very human people from the past in terms of the 26th u.s. President Theodore Roosevelt I don't really have much to say about the actual process of restoring and coloring the pitch for itself as it was fairly straight forward and I've got videos which explain my wider process in far more depth than I'll be able to do so here what I will talk about however is the process that I nearly always have to go through after I've seemingly completed one of these images that of making it visually appealing for every person who views it so I think one of the most important things I ever learnt about colorization was to double-check my final piece of work on multiple screens what looks good backlit on a modern mobile phone might look terrible when viewed on an older television for example pretty much every person viewing my images will be doing so under different conditions sometimes ones far from ideal so to take you behind the scenes for a second I use a two monitor setup with my computer one of those monitors is an actual computer screen the other is a small TV which I also use for video games and such the television was never intended to be used as I use it often switched on for hours upon hours while I'm using my computer before going into entertainment use in the evenings I've been using it this way for nearly a decade pretty regularly and the contrast while never identical to the dedicated computer screen it's gradually moving further away as the screen wears out however for the purposes of colorization this worn out TV is actually pretty ideal colorization x' on my TV screen and more yellow in color and the contrast is much more severe this TV therefore is increasingly standing in as a tool for judging the potential worst case scenario for my work to be viewed by someone I never purposefully make adjustments to my work to cater for damaged screens as I assume there'll be a very small part of my audience that being said if a small brightness adjustment takes nothing away from how my image looks on a good screen but vastly improves its appearance on a less ideal screen obviously I'll make that change in this case I made ten different revision versions of this image purely to review on both my dual monitor setup and my mobile phone for this image I think I spent almost as much time making tweaks and checking new versions of it as I spent originally coloring it finally let's finish with president 27 William Howard Taft so I feel this picture probably best represents the entire process involved with colorization so the first stage is always to select your image unlike with Andrew Jackson I had multiple images to pick from where William Howard Taft's face was clearly visible I decided to go with this picture due to it being a full-length body portrait William Howard Taft is best remembered for his large stature this was the same during his life and he was even nicknamed big bill by the press at the time for that reason much like choosing to represent president and formally general ulysses s grant in his military uniform I wanted to show Taft as he is and was typically viewed next up was the restoration phase which involved both repairing some cracks to the negative and generally removing a lot of dust and scratches what glass negatives tend to gain in terms of producing an image with a rich contrast they tend to lose in just how vulnerable to damage they are at the end of the restoration stage I noticed that the books in the bookcase had backwards titles and the image therefore had to be flipped the coloring process for this image was by far the most complicated of any in this presidential project the issue with having this particular full-length portrait is that there are a lot of other objects in the scene which also had to be colored there were telephones ink wells books a bookcase a flag and all of them required multiple layers of base colors shadows and highlights to color them accurately my favorite detail in this picture is this what appears to be reflector used to bounce some of the natural sunlight onto Taft Shadowside it's unusual to see old photographic equipment to be actually captured within the photograph I assume this was intended to be cropped out of the final printed image but it's obviously still intact on the raw negative the final stage of coloring this image as it is with most images is to recreate any lighting effects which would have been in the original setting so in this case we have a large window shining light onto Taft so I made that light slightly yellow I also added a contrasting purple to the darker shadow areas of the image away from the window light if you're interested in learning more about colorization or restoration I have in-depth tutorials for doing both in Photoshop on my channel it's worth saying that despite this project being primarily about restoring and coloring the black and white photographic president's a lot of the color images are used also required at least some minor repair work this image of the 38th President Gerald Ford for example required quite a lot of repairs as you can see so that was a run-through of the process involved with restoring and coloring in the US presidents I found this project really rewarding but not necessarily for the reasons I thought I would history is a subject which I never had much skill with learning before I typically fare better with things such as software where I have to learn by seeing and then doing rather than by purely remembering things by spending so long with this project 100 hours at lowest estimate with additional time spent writing about these men I really found myself picking up a lot of historical information which I would never have learned through more traditional means for me it was nice to realize that it wasn't my inability to learn about history and retain the information but more about the wire had been trying to learn it before I can only imagine this may be the case for other subjects I've struggled with picking up in the past I look forward to more in-depth historical projects like this and adding to my own knowledge of history in the process I really hope this project will also benefit others but even if it never gains much traction I feel it was useful for me and I move on to further projects more confident I'll be able to both complete them and also learn from them than ever before if you'd like to see all of the completed presidential pictures please check out my original video I will leave some links in the description including a link to an interview I did on the project for history colored as mentioned earlier if you have any suggestions for what kind of videos you'd like to see from me please let me know in the comments also if you have any questions about this project which I've not covered please feel free to leave them below also thanks for watching

Channel: JBColourisation

Views: 284,393

Rating: 4.932878 out of 5

Keywords: 26 U.S PRESIDENTS WERE PHOTOSHOPPED. HERE'S WHY!, History, American History, Education, Photoshop, colorized, History Colored, History Restored, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, daguerreotypes, daguerreotype, glass negative, James Monroe, Restoration, Repair, Historical, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, colorization, Repaired, Photo Restoration, Photoshopped History, JBColourisation, preservation - topic, preservation, then and now

Id: 2eDtX-2XyYI

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/zaphodx42]

Hey, amazing work! You mentioned in-depth tutorials in your video - could you share a link to your channel? Thanks!

[u/JamesBerridge]

so near the beginning of the year I decided to try and colour every single u.S President who was only Photographed in Black and White.

I did so, and made a short video featuring every completed picture. Here's a longer behind-the-scenes video where I deep dive into the process and my wider thoughts.

I hope something in this may be of entertainment or use. Please let me know if you have any questions which I didn't answer in the video :).

James