Photo restoration and retouching

Whilst at my Grandparents over Christmas, my Grandad and I found two old cameras with film still inside them from the 80’s. I offered to develop the film and scan the negatives so that my family could see what had been captured. With the film sitting inside cameras for at least 30 years, I knew that there may have not been anything visible on the film, especially as one of the cameras had popped open when we found it.

After scanning in the negatives, I found that one of the rolls had scanned completely blue and with some fogging. Having watched a tutorial on how to ensure you get the correct tones when digitally scanning film negatives, I used the colour correction function on Photoshop, adding and taking away certain tones until I ended up with a relatively normal looking image.

The skills I gained through this process became particularly useful when editing my images for my Final Major Project. As the whole project is shot on film, there is always a chance that scanning negatives may add tones to the images that aren’t actually there. One image in particular came out with a strong blue tint, so I decided I would attempt to correct the colour of the image in Photoshop. The results were successful and wouldn’t have been possible without hours of trial and error and tutorial watching when restoring my grandparents long lost film!