Mending a photograph yourself
Mending a photograph by hand is a proper skill and a satisfying one, and the software is either inexpensive or free. Given the time and the inclination, doing it yourself is no sort of compromise.
It is also far slower than people expect. What follows is an honest account of one print, so that the decision gets made with the real figure rather than the optimistic one.
Side by side
| By hand, yourself | MemoryMend | |
|---|---|---|
| One photograph | Twenty minutes to an afternoon, by damage | A few minutes, and you need not watch |
| Fifty photographs | A winter | Half an hour or thereabouts |
| What it costs | Little or nothing, plus every evening | A pack price, paid once |
| Skill required | Considerable, and it takes months to build | None at all |
| Control | Total. Every judgement is yours | One tap for what is wrong, and no further decisions |
| Best used on | The print you care most about | The other forty-nine |
What a single print really involves
A decent scan first, which is the step everybody skips and then wrestles with for an hour. Then dust and speck removal, patient work at high magnification, and on an ordinary print it is most of the evening.
Then the structural business: cloning and healing along a tear, rebuilding the edges, and matching grain so the mended area does not sit smooth in a grainy photograph.
Then tone and colour, which on a faded print means working channel by channel rather than nudging a slider, since the three dyes have gone at different rates.
Twenty minutes if it is only dust. An afternoon if a tear crosses a face and you mind about the outcome.
The genuinely difficult parts
Grain. A mended patch smoother than its surroundings gives away nearly every amateur restoration, and putting it right means deliberately adding grain back.
Faces. Cloning across a face is where restraint has to come from somewhere, and where a beginner most often produces somebody almost but not quite right.
Knowing when to stop, which is the commonest failure by a distance: a photograph mended past the point of being a photograph.
Where doing it yourself plainly wins
You want it a particular way, and nobody else knows what that way is.
The photograph needs a judgement rather than a mend — a decision about what belongs in the gap.
You enjoy the work. That is a complete answer and requires no justification.
What we cannot match
- What you know about the photograph. Which twin is which, what colour the coat was, who is standing at the back — none of that is available to us.
- Being able to stop halfway and take an entirely different approach.
- A skilled hour spent on one print, which beats anything automatic and always will.
The sensible division of labour
- Do the one that matters most yourself, slowly, and enjoy the evening.
- Send the tin. The prints you would never have got round to are exactly what automatic mending is for.
- If you are learning, mend one here for nothing and use it as a reference for what to aim at. None of this is a trade secret.
Questions
- Which software would you suggest?
- Anything with healing, cloning and layer masks will do. The expensive one is the industry standard and the free ones are perfectly capable — the software is not what makes this difficult.
- How long before I am any good?
- A weekend for dust and scratches; considerably longer for tears across faces. Grain matching is what separates work that survives a full-size look from work that does not.
- May I work on your mend afterwards?
- Certainly, and some people do exactly that. The mended file is yours, so treating it as a starting point for hand work is a perfectly sound way to go about it.
The cheapest way to decide
Have one photograph mended here for nothing and set it beside whatever else you were weighing up. No card, and a few minutes of your evening.
Mend one photograph, freeIf it doesn't look like the person you remember, you don't pay.