Clock Face Restoration

[Film Photog]

I have some antique clocks with faded, damaged, and stained faces for which replacements are unavailable.  I was wondering if it would be possible to bring them back to life using Affinity and some of its tools.  Would it be possible to do this using layers, one for background and one for numerals.  Any advice is greatly appreciated. 

[wonderings]

It looks like something you could easily reset. The difficulty would probably be the numbers themselves. Not sure how old that is but guessing pre computer age so there is probably no exact font equivalent. I tried a quick search on www.whatthefont.com with no luck. Seeing as they are straight lines though you could also pretty easily trace those on in Designer and make vector versions.

[John Rostron]

I'm no expert on restoration, but I would:

Create a duplicate layer to work on.

Add a Threshold Adjustment Layer with a threshold of about 80%. This should eliminate the brownish background and allow you to work on the black.

Clean up the black stuff. I would start with the Inpainting Brush.

Delete all the white background.

Go to the original background and duplicate again. 

Cut out the central disc. This looks to be in reasonable condition and does not need restoring.

On a new blank layer, create a circle the size of the clockface and fill with a suitable beige colour.

Re-assemble the clock with the beige circle, then the central disc, then the black numbers etc.

John

[kirkt]

Scan the clock face or photograph it paying particular attention to making sure that the face is perpendicular to the axis of the camera lens (so circles remain circular, for example).  Use a vector tool to trace the various characters and markings and create a PDF or similar vector output file.  There are many different ways you can then print or etch the graphics onto a new dial and replace the existing, aging dial.

I assume you want to restore the clock's dial versus just retouching the photo of the clock.

Have fun! - Kirk

[Gear maker]

37 minutes ago, Film Photog said:

I have some antique clocks with faded, damaged, and stained faces for which replacements are unavailable.  I was wondering if it would be possible to bring them back to life using Affinity and some of its tools.  Would it be possible to do this using layers, one for background and one for numerals.  Any advice is greatly appreciated. 

With AD this is fairly easy.  Here's my suggested start.  I think you'll be able to see what I have done.

Clock face1.afdesign

[Wosven]

To keep the vintage feeling and mood, I wouldn't redo it, but would use paint  to unify the background a little bit and mask most of the stains, and what we call "encre de Chine" (China ink ? a black, thick and  indelebile ink) or some ink/paint diluted to get the same texture. My old ruling pens are certainly somewhere here  

Do you have a picture of the full clock?

[Stephen Hart]

We did this exact thing a few years ago before switching to Affinity Photo.

We did try repairing the metal face with paint, but that looked terrible, so we cleaned the paint off and went with Photoshop. (The Repair Shop, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Repair_Shop, has one genius painter than can do this kind of paint restoring, but it was beyond us.)

First we scanned the metal face at fairly high resolution on a flatbed scanner. Then we used various retouching tools to improve the stained background and repair scratches, chips and missing areas. We did not try to match fonts, probably impossible in an old clock, but you can fix individual numerals or characters by zooming in.

Finally, we printed on fine photo paper, cut out the new face leaving four small tabs and taped the tabs onto the back of the old face. With the face photo behind the curved glass cover in the reassembled clock, it's good enough to fool even people who are told to look carefully. This preserves the original as well.

[firstdefence]

Had a bit of fun doodling...

[v_kyr]

Just adding the missing numbers to what firstdefence already (re)created.

[myclay]

my quick take which only takes a couple seconds

would be to use a Threshold Adjustment set to divide,
> the result needs to be turned to its own image via right click,  Merge Visible,
>set this layer again to divide
>disable the Threshold Layer.
Now you have separated the stained and aged parts from the numerals and could use both in different projects (or to fake and reuse the antique look with different/available numerals..)

Automatic Results might not be to your liking so this would now take a bit more time than the couple seconds before since we would now erase the errors by hand.
For the above result of the background,I selected the white areas, used inpainting and then to further enhance the result, the inpainting brush tool to edit it out a bit more.
For the numerals;

If you want to edit the opacity (on areas which where mistakenly erased from the numerals) paint with white on the washed out divider layer, its interpreted as an alpha due to the divider.
To mask it further out, add another paint layer(Layer setting set to divide)  but now paint with black colour to edit out the unwanted black areas on the white  background.

To get the uneven colouring out, crush the colours to full black;
Add a Curve Adjustment and set it to LAB, edit the Lightness, keep the curve but add one point in the middle and set its XY to the following X 1 and its Y0.

If you would like to vectorize the pixel result, you could jump to for example inkscape and have it vectorised.
Optional and for a different purpose; If you want to enhance and keep the aging on the numerals, use an unsharp mask.