Digital Restoration: From Start to Finish [2nd edition]

Most photo-editing programs – and some digital cameras – come with tools to automatically fix problems with digital camera photos.

However, restoring older photographs and slides can be much harder. Enter Ctein, a photography enthusiast who restores vintage photos for a living – besides being a photographer and computer programmer. Sounds like our kind of guy, really.

His book, Digital Restoration: From Start to Finish, is well laid-out with colour examples throughout. We are glad they are there because otherwise it would be hard to believe some of the claims that it makes about restoring detail and removing defects.

Having got our hopes up with examples, Ctein explains how to make the various fixes. They are arranged in topics such as restoring colour and tone, removing defects and printing.

There is also a separate table of contents for the how-to guides, which is very handy when you want help quickly.

It contains advice on the hardware and software required to make these repairs too. We were glad to see that the cheaper Photoshop Elements is covered as well as the more expensive full version.

Hardware requirements are always changing but the advice will last for the long term in the way that it covers why certain recommendations have been made.

By the nature of the subject, this is quite a technical book: you will certainly find that your abilities in Photoshop will be improved.

Apart from some Photoshop-specific plugins the advice can be followed in other photo-editing software, although this might be trickier.

If you are lucky enough to have some old photos that need restoration work, this is an excellent book with plenty of useful and relevant advice.

You can preview some of the book's pages at the Focal Press website (at the time of writing this link was temperamental).

ISBN: 978-0-240-81208-3 (click to see a list of sources where you can buy or borrow this book, courtesy of Wikipedia's ISBN search tool)