A miracle of photographic skill - or how 20,000+ scratches were removed from a photo in seconds.
The photographs below show the results of a remarkable new method for the removal of scratches from captured images. The method takes original damaged negatives and captures the images almost completely scratch free, without the use of chemicals, oils or any other medium. No restoration, retouching or image manipulation is applied, except perhaps minor tonal adjustments if required.
This is a unique method that is of immense value to photographic archives and collections all over the world. It means that entire collections of acetate negatives can be captured in almost the original pristine condition, without the pixelation problems of scanning and then be transferred to new film or digitized - 95% of all scratches are removed by this method.
The photo archive at Sri Ramanasramam will be the first to benefit from this discovery. It will permit a complete set of new negatives to be produced, virtually devoid of damage without any retouching.
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The photo below was scanned in 2000 from an original severely damaged negative (click on it to load the full version 2.0mb to see the full extent of the damage). The photo was taken between 1930 amd 1940 and was under-exposed by at least three stops.
Below is the same image after the new capture method was used (click on it to load the full version 1.0mb). The remaining damage is due to fungus and emulsion flaking.
There has been no image manipulation, no software interpretation and no restoration or retouching of any kind.
The original negative remains exactly as it was.
