The Top Three Myths
Although the techniques of photo restoration have been around for quite a while we at InstaRestoration.com get regularly confronted with misconceptions of what photo restoration actually is and what it can do to save your family photos.
1. A.I. will solve it?
We regularly receive emails of people that tell us that our service is outdated and our prices not adequate. By far the most common argument we hear for that is that A.I. can easily do our job.
The modern world seems to be obsessed with the idea that computers in the form of A.I. (artificial intelligence) and robots sooner or later will be able to perform every thinkable task. We at InstaRestoration have been dealing with the idea of A.I. rendering our profession obsolete for way longer than you might imagine.
But what does all that mean for photo restoration? There are a couple of reasons why there is no photo restoration A.I. available that can fully and reliably restore images. The most important reason for that is, that recognizing an object is not the same as recreating an object. It certainly becomes way more difficult when artistic, cultural, and historical knowledge is needed to reconstruct the image.
Nvidia Inpainting: The future
The results are absolutely stunning but the program is still in a research phase. If you carefully watch the video you will see that the program is lacking exactly what we were referring to. The deep-learning A.I. is simply applying a "face" to it and not the actual face of the woman. Up until now, only a human can understand this complexity.
A.I. will eventually come and take over the world. In the future, It might and probably will make photo restoration obsolete but at the moment there is just no software available that can perform such outstanding results as a human.
2. Any photo can be repaired
Sometimes we receive heavily destroyed images which even we can't restore anymore. First of all, it is important to understand how photo restoration is actually working. We only use information that is already there. We are not actively creating something. As our profession's name already implies we are restoring information.
Sometimes photographs are so heavily damaged by fire, water or other circumstances that there is simply no information left to be restored. In such cases, there is only one way to "restore" the information. We have to retrieve the information from other photographs.
In all these cases the only way we can proceed with restoring your photo is by collecting additional photographs of that very person. We then have the chance to be able to reconstruct the face with the information provided in the other photographs.
We are currently setting up a pilot to work with talented painters which help us to reconstruct those lost photographs. Our talented painters will not only create digital paintings of your severely damaged photos but are also able to directly paint them with real oil paint.
3. Resolution can easily be improved
Another common misconception is that photo restoration can increase the resolution and thereby the quality of your photograph.
A lot of people think the resolution of their scanner determines the quality of their digitized photograph. Whereas this is partially true there is a physical limit to that. Increasing the resolution is not automatically increasing the quality of your scan. Quality improves tremendously for resolutions between 72dpi -600 dpi but in most cases won't help when scanning above 600dpi.
The negative is the real original
Back in the day when people still used negative film to take photos, the negative is the real original. This is the chemical process that directly corresponds to the physical world. All prints made of these negatives are simple copies of that original. The print is produced for that size and that size only.
Scanning your photographic print with 300 dpi equals an exact reproduction of that print. With 600 dpi you can print your photograph double the size. Nevertheless, be aware this doesn't mean that there is any more information in your photograph.
This is certainly not the case for negatives. If you work with negatives, learn how to clean them properly before scanning. Not only is the negative the original but also is it intended to be enlarged. Hence it is always better to scan the original negative than the printed photograph.
But what does this all have to do with photo restoration?
Photo restoration artists are working with the information that is hidden but somehow still there. What we can't do is add information we don't have. This means the resolution of your photograph is determined by its original physical size. In most cases, it is simply physically not possible to enlarge the photograph by more than two times.
Related Articles
- Our Services & Prices — See what professional restoration really costs.
- The Techniques of Photo Restoration — How we actually restore damaged photographs.