Salvageable or not?

[Ren De]

In the opinion of those in the forum who are more experienced with Affinity Photo, does this example have enough of the original image to be saved by retouching. Any tips on how to begin would be very much appreciated. (Like which tools would be most appropriate to use in the initial stages.) This question must seem so basic but my use of Affinity software has been 95% focused on Designer. The photo here is from a family album in the Philippines. I hope I can help them recover the image but am at a loss as to the best approach.

[Ron P.]

Yes it can be restored, however it takes a lot of patience and time. I learned from a course offered by Simon Foster, aka forum member @drippy cat. He has tutorials, that are in-depth and I thought was very much worth what they cost. The specific course he offers for Affinity Photo, Restoring, is found in the Little Box Of Tricks. He has them hosted through Udemy.com

The prices vary, most of the time they're very affordable.

 

[Ren De]

Thanks, Ron. I will have a look at the course..

[NotMyFault]

You don’t need to pay for tutorials.

There are many good tutorials for free on how to “restore old photos” (if you want to learn the process yourself and do it yourself). In case you want to save time or effort, you can search for (paid) web-services that automatically restore such images.

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=affinity+photo+restore+old+photos

 

[jmwellborn]

@Ren De Olivio Sarikas has posted an excellent tutorial fix old photos restoration guide in the tutorials section of these forums.   You might find it very helpful.

[Granddaddy]

Olivios's restoration tutorial is at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXc-Gh3rcN4

InAffinity also has a couple at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mav026pYTV4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDb6T1Vkr0Q

Your own photo is very fixable with a little patience. If the basic structures are there, then blemishes can be removed. Missing parts can be cloned in. You crop out the impossible parts, but even the lower left corner can be rebuilt somewhat with the clone tool.

 

I did the following restoration for a friend 6 years ago with an alternative product, long before I discovered nondestructive editing. What you can't see in these small versions is the amount of scattered water damage over parts of the building and sidewalks. Today I could do a much better job using APhoto.

 

If you are going to do many restorations, you might be interested in Affinity Revolution's course at
https://courses.affinityrevolution.com/p/photo-restoration-for-beginners/

 

[jmwellborn]

@Ren De  Here is a very, very rough effort, just with the Inpainting Brush Tool, a Black and White Adjustment, plus the Dust and Scratches filter.  I made no effort to recover the lower left portion.  Others would do a much better job.

[NotMyFault]

Before others invests time to edit the image uploaded in the first post: Please scan the photo in better quality, and save it as tiff or png without compression. The scan quality with lots of compression artifacts is not suitable to create a good result. As the photo shows a strong color (the RGB channels faded individually), this can be used as advantage to automatically detected scratches, so please scan in full color and if possible with 16 bit  color depth. This will allow to create a almost perfect result.

[Ren De]

Wow! Thanks, guys. Your examples and advice are inspiring. I am having some success and will show my results (if they are not too embarrassing 😏)…

[Ren De]

I can see that one could work on a photo like this for an almost infinite span of time and still see more corrections to be made, but your examples and  this short dip into the world of photo restoration has shown me that it is possible to restore from even severe damage. I probably won’t spend a lot more time on this one, but I am very grateful for your help. I thank you, and my family thanks you!