Restoring Prokudin-Gorskii's Photographs

I have been fascinated about the antique colour photographs taken by Russian photographer and inventor S. M. Prokudin-Gorskii a century ago, since I first saw the online exhibition The Empire that was Russia. A few years ago, I downloaded and restored some of those photos, but then stopped doing that and concentrated more on my own photography.

Recently, I decided to continue this project and added about 20 new restorations to Prokudin-Gorskii gallery of my new website. Here is one of the latest restorations and one of most difficult I've done so far. (Click to enlarge).

Not only was the original badly damaged, it also had heavy vignetting on the top, which occurred when the photographer used camera movements to correct perspective. The topmost cross was on one plate only, so I had to actually "repaint" the sky.

While colour rendition is subject to artist's taste, I can tell that technically my restorations are better than those done by the Library of Congress, even those done manually not to mention computer generated. When restoring manually, they mostly left the blue channel intact, and I correct defects in all channels.

I am going to upload at least a couple new images per week, depending on how busy I am, so please check my gallery from time to time.

Later I hope to put together a book of PG's photos and make it available for online purchase.

A couple of pictures I restored recently

This is a family photo ca. 1900. It was preserved in poor condition and got torn and stained by cockroaches or other insects. The photo was about 10x16", too big for my scanner. I had to scan it in parts and then stitch in Photoshop. The Digital ICE did good job in removing cracks, but screwed up some other areas – it doesn't work properly with opaque and monochrome images. I had to scan it again without ICE and use parts of that image to cover ICE's errors.

Here is the restored picture. Apart from some corner unsharpness, those large glass negatives captured very good detail (check out the grandpa's beard!). It shows that sensor size does really matter! 

The second picture was a pencil drawing cracked so badly that ICE and usual small brush cloning technique were useless. I took a large soft cloning brush and actually "painted" the whole image trying to preserve pencil texture wherever possible. 

All pictures clickable.

Autumn in Asia 100 years ago

Taken by S. M. Prokudin-Gorskii near Samarkand, Russian Empire (now Uzbekistan) between 1905 and 1915.