Film Photog Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wonderings Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Rostron Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 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 Quote Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kirkt Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gear maker Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 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 Quote iMac (27-inch, Late 2009) with macOS Sierra Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wosven Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stephen Hart Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 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. Wosven 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
firstdefence Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 Had a bit of fun doodling... v_kyr 1 Quote iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9 (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum) Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
v_kyr Posted January 23, 2021 Share Posted January 23, 2021 Just adding the missing numbers to what firstdefence already (re)created. firstdefence 1 Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
myclay Posted January 23, 2021 Share Posted January 23, 2021 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. firstdefence 1 Quote Sketchbook (with Affinity Suite usage) | timurariman.com | artstation store Windows 11 Pro - 23H2 | Ryzen 5800X3D | RTX 3090 - 24GB | 128GB | Main SSD with 1TB | SSD 4TB | PCIe SSD 256GB (configured as Scratch disk) | Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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