Restore an Old Photo Ep 106: Take & Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey: Adorama Photography TV

[Music] in this video I'll show you how to turn back time and restore a photo that's nearly 100 years old adoramatv presents take and make great photography with Gavin Hoey where you'll learn how to take stunning photos and then polish them in post-production here's your host Gavin Hoey hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching adoramatv now today I'm back in the studio but I'm not going to be photographing a person I'm actually gonna be photographing a photograph yeah I know that kind of sounds a bit crazy doesn't it but we're going to do some restoration so in a bit I'll show you how I do the Photoshop part of the restoration but to begin with of course we have to actually photograph the photograph now any photography it lives and dies on lighting the better the lighting the better the photograph so today I'm using these two guys here these are two continuous lights and they're going to be my illumination for this shoot now you might be wondering why I'm using continuous light and not flashlights well you could use flash there's no particular reason why not the advantage of continuous lights though is you see exactly what you're going to get so when you look through the viewfinder you can tell instantly whether it's worked or not and because this isn't moving I don't need to worry about fast shutter speeds or freezing action so continuous light it is now the lights themselves are fairly small and that's okay because the object we're going to photograph is fairly small but the angle at which I put them is absolutely vital so rather than having the lights fairly high up and beaming down I'm actually going to put the lights down fairly low so let's just drop these right the way down and this one as well like that now the reason I've done that is because I'm going to be shooting from above looking straight down and if I have the light coming straight down from above what's going to happen is the light will come down hit the surface of the print and bounce straight back into the camera and that's going to give me flare reflections and it's going to give me a add photograph to start with and I need the best quality image into Photoshop to get the best quality results so by having the lights down at 45 degrees or lower the lights going to come in bounce off the surface and go away from the camera that's the theory anyway speaking of cameras I better go and get one okay so for my camera I'm going to be using my good trusty setup that I use again and again the Canon 5d Mark - it's a full-frame camera going to give me the very best quality that I can get and also my 24 to 105 lens again it's an L quality lens going to give me the best quality into the camera and therefore hopefully the best quality print out of the computer so that's the camera what about the setup well I'm going to be working in aperture priority mode and I'm going to be working around about f11 simply put f11 gives me the very best quality I can get out of this lens on a full frame camera sometimes the edges of your your images can be a little bit soft so by stopping it down to f11 I'm going to minimize that effect so aperture priority mode f11 ISO well that's going to be as low as I can go 100 iso finally I'm going to frame it up so let's come down here and I'm using my zoom lens and this has a nice little bonus and as much as I can actually zoom in and out to frame this as close as I can but you'll notice I'm not going to frame it all the way up to the edges simply because I don't want any soft edges and I can crop those out if I've got a bit of working space ok we're pretty much ready to go all we've got to do now is turn the lights on that always helps and then my first shot I'm actually going to take a picture of a gray card now I normally use a gray card for portraits and things like that but in this case I want to make sure that I get the colors of the print correct even though it is a black and white sepia I want to try and keep it as authentic as possible so let me just slide my little gray card in and we'll get a shot of that right okay so that's my basic image set there's one other little trick that I have up my sleeve and that's I'm going to use live view mode Live View mode means I can frame everything up in a nice simple fashion and it also means that the mirror locks up as well so when I take my picture there's less movement less bounce in the picture and again that adds to the sharpness of the shot now with everything set I can really get away with just one or two photographs I don't really need to take any more than that but to be on the safe side I'm going to bracket my shots one stop over and one stop under using exposure compensation just so I can be sure that I've got as much detail in there as I can possibly pull out and there you go there is my photograph photographed all we've got to do now is to get this into Photoshop and we'll do a bit of editing and that's what we're going to do right now okay so I'm back inside of Photoshop cs6 I'm just going to get the raw file that I shot this is the one I want to use you'll notice it's the one with the grey card well let's just turn that over the right way at the end of the day this was as sharp and as good as any other picture and because I've got my grey card in the shot all I need to do is to get my white balance tool here then click anywhere on my Y balcarce going to reset my colors now what I need to do is just crop this in now you might be wondering why are we going to the trouble of getting the right white balance on a black and white or sepia tone picture well the brief from the client because this was a proper client picture was to try and restore this sympathetically to try and keep the look of the old print but still give it a clean up so I started that theory then by always trying to keep the colors correct as well so that's what I've done and what I say the colors are correct that doesn't mean to say I don't want to make them stronger or weaker in fact I'm just going to take the vibrance down a little bit just so they're not quite as yellowy orange as they were before they're still the same tones but I think my camera has recorded it a little bit more than I remember seeing it okay now what about any other adjustments here now I'm actually going to be quite careful with this because I don't want to put too much contrast in at this stage because contrast is something I can add in in Photoshop very very easily but it's very hard to remove if it's there and at the moment my histogram has got really nothing in the whites and nothing in the blacks so I think maybe a little bit more exposure would be better and I'm going to pull the blacks back slightly and I may just open up the shadows and I think I'm gonna pull the highlights back in just like that so technically this is quite a flat picture but that's okay I can restore it flat and add contrast at the end if it needs it and that's it for raw let's move into Photoshop okay so here inside of Photoshop cs6 you can see I've actually spent a little bit of time restoring the lower half of the picture already just to give you an idea of where we're heading the top half here still needs to be done now obviously in the time I've got in this video I can't show you every click of the mouse so what I'm going to do is to cover my three favorite restoring tools and one really good tip let's start with a really good tip the really good tip is all about layers I'm going to come to layer choose new and layer and I'll call this restored and I'm going to make a blank layer now any restoration work I do will be on that layer that gives me a nice way of going backwards in time really easily but it also means I can flick it on and off to really tell whether the work I'm doing is actually improving the job now the most important thing you can do on any restoration job is spend time the more time you spend on the job the better it's going to be so if you're the sort of person that likes instant results maybe restoration isn't for you but there are some tools that speed things up now my first one and my favorite one is the Spot Healing Brush now Spot Healing Brush has been around for a while and in the last few versions of Photoshop content-aware has been added and that's brilliant since Photoshop cs5 all I have to do now is just draw over this area like that and even some very roughly it just disappears it's brilliant now how do i restored things across her face well a lot of people will grab this tool and sort of draw across and hope that the software will work it didn't did it really in fact it seemed to have added a moustache in and I'm pretty sure that's not correct so how do you use this tool on more fine areas well two things to do first of all well is to make your Spot Healing Brush much smaller not much bigger than the area you need to restore secondly go in little strokes don't try and do it all in one go just build the effect up gradually and you'll get a much better result by the way you'll notice that I'm working with the sample layer turned on so that will actually sample all of my layers and build up the effect on my empty blank layer that means I can flick this on and off very quickly so I'm using this just to build up the effect the other little tip I'll give you if we just whizzed over here is don't be afraid if something goes wrong if it doesn't quite work right like that sort of added a lump in there just build the effect up a couple more clicks and that will do the job okay so this Spot Healing Brush is a very powerful tool what if you don't have the Spot Healing Brush or you want to use something else well then have a look at the clone stamp tool again make sure that all layers is turned on it'll be off by default so make sure you go and switch that on and that means I can come in sample let's Jen put that back on there we go come and sample a layer now it does help to press the Alt key so I'll press the Alt key and I can use this tool to line up the area I want to heal and restore so I can line up his shirt and his shoulder like that and there we go so it's a very powerful tool very good when you need to follow edges so I need to follow the edge of the print here so let's just sample there and then we can just go and do that little bit around there and it's a good idea to move your sampling point every now and again hold the alt or the option key on a Mac of course and just resample to tidy things up okay so that's also useful tool what about the last tool well the last one is specific to photoshop cs6 and you'll find it hidden away belief beneath the Spot Healing Brush it's the patch tool now I know your organization out at me and say well the patch tool has been around since Photoshop cs4 three-car member quite a while well in Photoshop cs6 they took the normal patch tool and gave it content-aware ability this is terrific this applies the content-aware in a very specific place so I can draw very roughly I can go right over the edge of the border all the way up the top over the edge of the border and back down again now normally going over the edges here and here would cause the patch tool to try and blend in these light and dark tones but now I can drag my patch sample over and let go and it will keep that line intact Wow look at that that is just so much better than it was before now I can very quickly whiz round tidy these areas up making quite rough selections and it'll just work and there we go it's perhaps not quite as accurate as say the the clone tool so do bear that in mind but it's a very very quick and very powerful way of healing up large areas so I'm going to find that bit there and these kind of bits here we can go sample from a cleaner area over there okay so I can use that tool to really speed up my effect and obviously you have to use it over a larger areas and take time to build it up so there is my restored image so far and that's the bits I've done in those few seconds I've been doing this but through the magic of video here's the final restored picture and I've tried to keep the elements of the original so it's not looking like a modern picture that's old but an old picture that's been lovingly cared for I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching adoramatv is brought to you by Adorama your best source for the equipment and knowledge you need for all the latest photography video and computer gear visit adorama.com place your order by 7:00 p.m. and it ships the same day plus the next time you're in new york city be sure to visit our store located on 18th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue check out the Adorama rental company for professional cameras lighting computers and more we'll help you make the best selection to match your needs while giving you the knowledge to achieve the best outcome from your rental Adorama is your complete solution for equipment printing training and more Adorama more than a camera store [Music]

Channel: Adorama

Views: 255,961

Rating: 4.7344599 out of 5

Keywords: camera;, photography;, adorama, tv;, adoramatv;, adotv;, adorama;, image, Hoey, motion, restore, exposure, photoshop, adobe, gear, photo, flashpoint, Canon, shooting, Mobile Device

Id: nB8GJVmPp2s

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 28 2012