Photographs, slides and negatives are born in water.  Yet water is their enemy.  Once photos become wet, their gelatin  layer softens and if allowed to dry - in contact with other photos, plastic covers or glass - they become extremely difficult to separate. So what do you do if your photos have become wet for any reason?

The American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works ("AIC") recommends the following steps for water-affected photos (NOT home printed or professional inkjet photos):

• Separate wet photos from frames. If photographs are wet within the frame, unframe carefully watching for any areas that may be stuck to glass or mats and air dry.
• Air dry in a single layer, image or dull-side up (for negatives) on absorbent or screen materials. Do not sun dry.
• “Quick-rinse” muddy items in a bucket of cool, cleanest available water. Skip rinsing step if the photograph is lifting or separating: Look closely along edges.
• Do not touch the surface; do not blot off excess water.
• If wet and stuck in a stack, gently peel apart at a low angle - only if possible. Do not force separation. Some image loss may occur.
• Freeze in current housing if quantity exceeds response time (follow AIC Freezing guidelines).

Consult the full AIC article if you intend to follow these procedures yourself: Stabilizing Wet Photographic Materials

Most photographic prints and negatives were created using water.  Water was used to rinse away the various developing chemicals when the photograph was first printed. In many cases a "wetting agent" was used in the final wash to minimize the formation of water spots on the image. After that, the prints were carefully dried.

Modern professional photo papers (from the 1970s onward) were resin (polyethylene) coated which meant that water could not soak into and swell and distort the paper fibers.

It follows that most (but not all) professionally produced photographs, slides and negatives can become soaked in water and still survive. There may be "tide" marks and water residue but if the only thing which has happened is exposure to water - then the prognosis is often good.    

Photographs, slides and negatives which are stuck to each other or to another surface should not be allowed to dry.  Once dry, "blocked" photos or negatives are extremely difficult to separate. And, even when successfully separated, there is likely to be some tearing and there might already have been serious or even fatal "leaching" or "bleeding" of color dyes that was not apparent in the stack.

There are a limited number of protocols that certain professional AIC conservationists have developed which hold out some promise of saving at least some or at least part of images which have become stuck due to water damage.  Those protocols require de-ionized water, strict control over pH and temperature, and great care both with the mechanical separation as well as the drying of the prints.

PhotoFixRestore has had some success applying the AIC separation protocols to water damaged photos.  Generally the photo restoration has three phases.  Phase one is assessing the photos and determining the appropriate course of action.  Phase two involves the chemistry, the separation, and the drying.  Phase three demands scanning, our state-of-the-art digital photo restoration techniques and custom printing.

It would be funny if it wasn't often tragic: the family dog chews the photo; a vindictive lover tears (or scissors) up their couple photos only to reunite with their partner; a disaffected child feels unloved so rips up a photo of himself.  Or, the photo was just too much loved and wore out! We have seen (and fixed) all these situations. 

So what is the prognosis for a torn photo?  Can every torn photo be convincingly repaired and what is involved? What can you do if there are missing pieces? Are any images beyond repair?

When we get a photo which has been ripped apart there are five questions that we ask and that will determine how much time will be involved in the fix. First, do we have all the pieces? If the missing piece is from a vital area (the eyes, the nose or the mouth, for example) then we ask a second question: Can we use the intact information in the photo to help us? For example, one damaged eye can often be repaired by using the other eye.

If the missing piece is major and involves the whole of the subject's head or another vital body part then we get to the third question: Is there another photo of the same person taken at about the same time. 

If there is another photo of the affected person, then there is a good chance that we can use it to supply the missing information and make a perfect repair.

The fourth question we ask is: what else needs to be done? 

Seldom is the the tear the only problem.  Often there are other issues such as fixing color tone, removing small dust and minor scratches, or most commonly, overcoming earlier repair efforts like the staining and discoloration caused by old adhesive tape. Also common - and easily fixable - is a missing piece from a non-vital part of the photograph.

So, how do we go about fixing a torn photo? 

We like to scan each piece in high resolution separately. We take care to hold the scanner's color settings constant so that the color tone does not change across the pieces. For information about scanning, see our DIY Scanning page.

Before

After (notice the man on the right is cropped out!)

This week PhotoFixRestore helped the Coca Cola Company with a series of stunning black and white old photo colorizations and repairs which Coke then used in its 2019 Veterans Day social media campaign.

To be chosen and trusted by Coke to do this aesthetically demanding and technically tricky work is, to say the least, quite a compliment to the team here.  And we celebrated how? You guessed it:  With Coke! (Diet Cokes all around).

Coca Cola has been around for a long time and during WWII it shipped a gazillion bottles to soldiers fighting overseas.  It is not hard to imagine how welcome a Coke would have been to these heroic, exhausted men.  The Company tweeted yesterday:

"Our history of supporting the U.S. military began in 1941 when Coca-Cola President Robert Woodruff vowed to make Coca-Cola available to every person in uniform for five cents, no matter what it cost the company. Our legacy of serving those who serve continues today."

Lamar State College is a two year school in Orange, Southeast Texas. And this year it is celebrating its first 50 years in education. These days, the College has nearly 3,000 students and offers courses in five divisions: liberal arts, mathematics and science, business and technology, education and allied health. It offers 30 technical programs and is a jewel to the town of Orange, the surrounding communities and the wider Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana.

These are all issues that can be very annoying but can also be fixed.

Folks ask us to improve images to replace a favorite image in a frame, to use on a website or for promotional purposes, as a gift, or for memorial cards - or for any one of a thousand different and all valid reasons.

Call us, or upload an image, for an obligation free opinion on what can be done to improve your so-so photo.

A major new book on the history of Clay County, Kentucky has been published featuring over a dozen historical photos - sumptuously colorized by the digital artists right here at PhotoFixRestore!

"The Clay We Were - A Visual Journey" celebrates the early history of Clay County in the western Appalachians and the special breed of hardy people who called it home. The 450 page, large format volume was curated by the Clay County Genealogical and Historical Society and contains more than 1800 photos!

The Clay County Genealogical and Historical Society is in the forefront of historical societies in discovering and researching its own history and making that history accessible to its people - and to folks all across the country. The quality of the work is astonishing.

If you would like a copy of this intriguing and important hard cover tome (sewn, not glued) then you can order copies direct from the Society.  Visit their website (https://clayfamilies.org/shop) or email the good people there at ccgnhs@gmail.com.

This time of year, many of our clients are asking us to colorize an old black and white photo to give as a gift. It is often an old photo of a grandmother or a grandfather, or a parent back in their glory days! Sometimes it's a picture of a loved one who has now passed.  Or, it's a color picture which, with the passage of time (and poor original chemistry) has lost its vibrancy.

Colorizing an old black and white photo can make it come alive in a whole new way. The image might be familiar but the addition of carefully chosen colors can give the photo a whole new lease on life! Details which had been overlooked, all of a sudden become apparent.

Or, how about making it into a real work of art?  Advances in print technology now give us the freedom to be truly creative with our old photos and opens up whole new possibilities for display and enjoyment.

You can print on large wood panels which allows the grain to show through. Or for an "industrial, shabby chic or bohemian look", some folks have their image made into "engineer prints" - like the large, lightweight prints used by architects.  The New York Times has gathered a number of these cutting edge ideas into a very helpful article: "Turning Your Photos into Art".

Sometimes the only image we have of somebody or some thing is a cutting made from a newspaper.  Maybe it's Mom's old wedding announcement and photo; maybe it's a sports shot or a business story in a local paper. In most cases the newspaper company has disappeared or won't return your call!

In our photo repair and photo restoration business, we get a steady stream of news and magazine cuttings to turn into photos.  We also get asked to make a proper photo from school and college year books. Can you make a proper photo from a news cutting? Can it be done well?

 Converting a halftone to a proper photo is quite straightforward from a photo repair or photo restoration technical point of view.  You carefully blur the overall image (maybe a Gaussian blur, maybe use the "median" filter) then you "sharpen" it - increasing the contrast between the light and dark areas. The art comes in managing the trade-off between keeping the dots apparent and accepting some blur.

Finally you clean up any dots or stray lines and adjust contrast and maybe add some color. We always add a border the same tone and texture as the news or magazine paper stock - as most cuttings are really squashed in there. The real art comes in managing expectations - halftones are very low quality and no amount of Photoshop magic can replace what is no longer there.  (A small face in a larger picture - say a sports photo - might be constituted by only a dozen dots across and only a few more down.)