Photoshop Instructional: Digital Restoration

The use of PhotoShop to repair damaged art pieces can replace the dangers of repairing the physical items and causing further irreversible changes.

Previous examples of restoration that have been done to damaged items demonstrate why using a digital platform to recreate the original item is a safer procedure.

Pictured on the left is Elias Garcia Martinez's 'Ecce Homo', it was restored by a volunteer who had no previous experience restoring art. https://theworld.org/stories/2012-08-25/amateur-restoration-botches-jesus-painting-spain

On the right is an area from The Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck and Hubert van Eyck, that was restored and the lamb of God face repainted oddly in a restoration. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51205614

The last image is a portrait of Frederic Chopin, this is the image being restored in this instructable.

Open the PhotoShop program, from here click the file button on the top left menu. Next select Open, then select the file of the image that is to be worked on. It is important to have a high resolution photograph or scan of the image.

Much of the painting is missing and it can not be completely known what could potentially have been located there, but i common sense of the portrait will help fill in the areas. seeing that there is a light brown inner circle surrounded by a darker brown outer ring, the painting can be filled in with this observation.

Out of the many helpful tools PhotoShop offers to modify photos, the spot healing brush tool is one of the most useful. This tool allows an area to be highlighted and uses the surrounding area to smart fill in the selected area. To use the tool navigate to the tool bar on the left hand side, and select the spot healing brush tool as seen in the image above.

Once the spot healing tool has been selected, the desired brush size can be selected on the top menu bar. Then the user can begin to highlight a desired area to be filled in by the tool such as the area in the image.

While using the spot healing brush tool, if too large of a missing area is selected, the tool can incorrectly fill in the selected area. This results in incorrect colours and repeated patterns that are cloned across the area. This error can be seen in the images provided. Since this process is being conducted digitally any erros such as these can be easily undone, unlike physical restorations.

Now with most of the missing areas patched up the lighting of the painting needs to be adjusted to reflect what it would have look like when originally painted. As colour in paint can fade over years, with the varnish changing its tint, the image needs to be colour corrected. An art historian, conservator or artist who is familiar with how a paintings colours could have originally appeared will provide input to how the final product should appear. Once the proper colour palette has been decided the colors can be altered.

In order to correct the current colours of the painting, you will need to select Layer on the top menu bar, and from the drop down menu select new adjustment layer. From here multiple types of adjustments can be made such as brightness/contrast, exposure, vibrance, hue/saturation and color balance.

With the colors properly adjusted, there might be some noticeable areas that are not similar in tone, such as the right top and bottom corners of this painting in comparison to the darker left corners. In order to fix this select the burn tool, as shown above, in the left hand tool bar. The burn tool darkens the selected area to one's desire. There is also a dodge tool that can be used to lighten any areas if need be, here it is used on the highlighted areas of the face.

One of the final steps that can be taken to fix an image is to use the blur tool that is on the left tool bar, this can be used to remove imperfections left from the original damage and later the spot healing process. This will create a more polished image that appears to be painted and not cracked and wrinkled.

Now that the image is complete it can be exported as a png or jpeg file to save it as a solid image instead of the PhotoShop format. This image can now be shared on the collections website, social media or even be used in a museum app that allows visitors to see an original version of the image before them. An augmented reality app that allows users to scan over objects such as paintings to compare the real to the digitally restored version.