Old Photo Restoration Filter in PS

[Clovishound]

I finally installed Photoshop yesterday and have been playing around with it. While looking for tutorials I ran across a reference to this filter. It's a beta, but I wanted to try it as my wife is into genealogy. Good news and bad news. I tried it on three photos. It failed on two of them, but worked on one. I was impressed.

I tried it on one photo I would really like to enhance and it failed. Not sure if a change in settings, or perhaps changes to the filter when it is fully released will allow me to use this successfully on it. Might be my computer just doesn't have the beans to manage it. It's not exactly a gaming computer. It took a little while for it to process this pic.

This is the original:

Yes, that is me on the cow.

This is the restored version. l did use the spot healing brush on a few small spots, the stain on the left, and one thin scratch. It was quicker to do that than to change the settings and redo the entire picture. Looking at the full sized picture here, I should have worked on a couple more spots, but I'm quite impressed with the results. It doesn't even come close to the enhance feature in Lightroom. I could probably do some work on the shadowed section of my dad's face, but it's pretty good as is, with just a few minutes work.

 

[Clovishound]

OK, I was able to get the picture that failed to work. I had done some work on the image in Lightroom, so I found the original unedited file and ran that.

It worked.

Wasn't as good as I hoped, but a definite improvement.

Original:

My grandfather working as a cowboy just prior to WWI.

And the restored version. Again I spent less than a minute doing some spot healing.

 

[Fred Kingston_RIP]

 

[Clovishound]

I assume you used topaz on those. It really took the first photo up a notch.

I need to play around with the filter in PS. The enhancement slider was only on about 50%. I haven't tried it on higher enhancement due to it taking a while to process, and I've had a couple of crashes. I may not have enough RAM for this, and a faster processor wouldn't hurt either.

 

[Fred Kingston_RIP]

I assume you used topaz on those. It really took the first photo up a notch.

I need to play around with the filter in PS. The enhancement slider was only on about 50%. I haven't tried it on higher enhancement due to it taking a while to process, and I've had a couple of crashes. I may not have enough RAM for this, and a faster processor wouldn't hurt either.

Yup... I didn't tweak Topaz, just ran the images... AI does some funky stuff... I'm finding the "better" an image is, the better the results... different defects tend to get amplified...especially ones that are textures/patterns... i.e., those scratches or striations in the horse

 

[Needa]

@Clovishound
Like the pics, interesting. Did you start with a scan or photo of photo?

 

[Clovishound]

Here is the result from running it at 100% enhancement, and 100% facial enhancement. No other edits made. There are only a few options to choose from with this filter. I might try backing off on the facial enhancement and see how it compares. I think the face in the first iteration, and the Topaz version was better. PS seemed to do a better job on the horse and jacket than Topaz, which left artifacts.

I also ran the companion photo to this through at 100% enhancement. It's better than original, but not the huge improvement seen with the first one.

 

[Clovishound]

@Clovishound
Like the pics, interesting. Did you start with a scan or photo of photo?

This is the scan of a photo. I am sure that the photo I scanned was a photographic copy of the original. It's likely my dad made the copy in the 60s or 70s, and the original was either lost, or is somewhere in a relative's closet. I would love to get a hold of the original, it is a really neat set of photographs, but the quality is poor. I remember my grandfather telling stories about working as a cowboy in Wyoming in the early part of the 20th century. This photograph was taken, presumably, just prior to WWI in Douglas Wyoming. Not sure if that's were my name came from.

And no, my name isn't Wyoming, it's Douglas.

 

[Fred Kingston_RIP]

This is the scan of a photo. I am sure that the photo I scanned was a photographic copy of the original. It's likely my dad made the copy in the 60s or 70s, and the original was either lost, or is somewhere in a relative's closet. I would love to get a hold of the original, it is a really neat set of photographs, but the quality is poor. I remember my grandfather telling stories about working as a cowboy in Wyoming in the early part of the 20th century. This photograph was taken, presumably, just prior to WWI in Douglas Wyoming. Not sure if that's were my name came from.

And no, my name isn't Wyoming, it's Douglas.

Prior to WWI would have been a wet plate...

 

[Clovishound]

Well, he was working as a cowboy there when he was drafted for WWI. They sent everyone home after he had been there a few weeks due to the Spanish flu. Everyone in the family says this was taken around the time he was drafted. Kodak introduce the Brownie in 1900, so it's quite possible that was the camera used. This ad is from 1900. I know that family oral histories can often be wrong, but we do have official copies of his draft paperwork which shows him working at a ranch outside of Douglas. Not sure of his timeline after being released by the Army, but his daughter insists this is where and when this picture was taken. She visited the ranch with him later in his life.

Intro to early 20th century photography

 

[Fred Kingston_RIP]

Probably correct... If it were a wet plate, the earliest it would have been "copied" would have been some time after WWII... An old Brownie Kodak print would have been pretty tattered by the late '40s, which pretty much aligns with the condition of the copy you have now... I keep forgetting that "after WWI" equals the late teens early '20s...

 

[Bikerbrent]

Here is the result from running it at 100% enhancement, and 100% facial enhancement. No other edits made. There are only a few options to choose from with this filter. I might try backing off on the facial enhancement and see how it compares. I think the face in the first iteration, and the Topaz version was better. PS seemed to do a better job on the horse and jacket than Topaz, which left artifacts.

I also ran the companion photo to this through at 100% enhancement. It's better than original, but not the huge improvement seen with the first one.
View attachment 385863

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Very nice jobs of very old photos Covishound. Your grandfather looks like a real old cowboy, complete with six shooter!!

 

[Clovishound]

Probably correct... If it were a wet plate, the earliest it would have been "copied" would have been some time after WWII... An old Brownie Kodak print would have been pretty tattered by the late '40s, which pretty much aligns with the condition of the copy you have now... I keep forgetting that "after WWI" equals the late teens early '20s...

He was born in the late 1890s and would have been around 20 when drafted. Hard to pin down his age from the photo, but around 20 fits. The copy I have has an overlaid criss cross pattern. I'm wondering if it was stored with cloth, or something else in contact and it put a pattern onto the original photo. If properly processed and stored, these old prints often hold up extremely well. My wife has some prints from the 19th century that are still in great shape.

I have learned to be leery of family stories. They often don't hold up to objective evidence. My great grandmother was supposed to be full blooded Native American. We even have a photo of her with a distinctive beaded collar and classic NA looks. DNA of one of my family in direct line doesn't agree.

 

[Clovishound]

Very nice jobs of very old photos Covishound. Your grandfather looks like a real old cowboy, complete with six shooter!!

If you look closely you can also see a lever action rifle, probably a Winchester, propped against the cabin wall, next to the lynx pelt.

 

[Bikerbrent]

If you look closely you can also see a lever action rifle, probably a Winchester, propped against the cabin wall, next to the lynx pelt.

Yes I see the rifle against the wall. Thank you.

 

[blackstar]

Nice photo work and a wonderful family story!

 

[Clovishound]

Well, to be honest, PS did almost all the work.

 

[Clovishound]

I've played around with a few more old photos. Some do much better than others.

Here's one of my mother.

Before: It's in pretty good shape, but very soft and lacking in resolution.

Here it is after running through the old photo restoration.

And just for fun, I ran it through colorize. I did have to touch up some gray areas in the hair. For some reason it didn't want to colorize some of the midtones to highlights in the hair. I used a brush in LR and selected the areas. I then adjusted the saturation and temp and it matched pretty well.

 

[Needa]

Did you notice it changed the shape of the lens?

 

[Clovishound]

No, I didn't.

Interesting. Thanks for pointing that out.

I'm sure that since the algorithms must try and differentiate between particulars of the original image, and defects from age, damage and poor photography when the picture was taken, there certainly are times when substantive, and erroneous decisions are made by the program.

There are sliders for a number of adjustments such as scratch reduction, face enhancement, etc. Sometimes they make a big difference in the result, sometimes not, and sometimes you have to back off because it goes too far.