Restoring old photos isn't particularly difficult. It can take hours and hours and hours of intricate work but if you're competent with Photoshop then you can soon figure out how to repair all the rips, stains and blemishes.

But reproducing and restoring these old photos presented three quite different challenges: Firstly, they were behind glass and they couldn't be removed from the frames. Secondly, the print of the man was warped. Thirdly, the picture of the man was slightly out-of-focus.

Reproducing and restoring old photos

The easy part of the job was that the prints were large and good quality. This made it a lot easier to get them onto the computer, which I did by photographing them with a 1Ds and a 24-70 f/2.8L lens at 50mm. You reproduce artwork at 50mm because it's the approximate focal length of the human eye. I stopped the lens down a touch to avoid any loss of quality from shooting wide open.

But how do you photograph a print through glass without reflections?

It's simple with hindsight but it took me a little while to figure it out. I propped the picture up on a chair and set-up a flash slightly in front of it but way up high and right over at the other side of the room. I angled the flash straight at the front of the frame. The idea was to have the light hitting the glass at a very sharp angle, and from far away to minimise fall-off across the surface of the print. Test shots revealed that the frame was casting a shadow onto the picture so I moved the flash forward until the shadow stopped being a problem. With a single light source coming from a known angle it was then a simple matter of taking the photo with a polarizer to cancel out any reflections. I also knew the temperature of the flash so I could get the white balance perfect, which is necessary for reproducing sepia-toned pictures even when they'll be converted to black & white.

That was the photo of the woman done. But as the photo of the man was warped, the paper was actually casting shadows onto itself! I eventually solved that problem by bringing the flash over to right in front of the picture, up high, angled straight down. The frame was lying on its side and the light was going along the ripples in the paper. This was an amazingly effective solution and I didn't need to spend a single second in processing to fix the warping. Neat, eh?

It was fairly simple from then on. Each picture took about 4 hours of work to remove all of the blemishes, which involved several thousand manual edits right down to the pixel level. The fading of the prints, and shooting through glass, required multiple tone curves to put a bit of contrast back into the pictures. And the picture of the man took another hour or so to fix the focus, or at least to force it as much as I could using multiple USM passes of decreasing radius.

The finished pictures were printed around 11"x17" on fine-art paper and they looked great. Throughout the processing I had made a point of NOT comparing them to the original prints, but when I finally did compare them I was more than satisfied that I'd done the job right.