Is Photoshop PS3 worth the upgrade for photo restoration?

Photoshop CS3 is here at last and has some exciting new features, but is there enough to upgrade for if you use Photoshop for photo restoration?

The workflow features have been improved through the streamlining of palettes and self-sdjusting docks, but the workflow and interface in CS2 wasn't exactly clunky or intrusive to begin with.

Adobe Bridge has been improved too ... big deal. Most people I know don't use it anyway. I find it useful, but not essential. Adobe say it is now faster, and yeah, it was kind of sluggish, but the improvements don't sound exactly mind blowing!

One new feature that is really worth a closer look, and should have made it into Photoshop a long time ago in my opinion, is non-destructive smart filters. Up until now you could only apply image adjustments (eg. levels, brightness/contrast, invert, etc.) non-destructively. With CS3 you can now apply filters, say a gaussian blur, to an image or a layer with the option of coming back later and adjusting the blur settings or removing it completely. Whether this feature will be limited to certain colour modes or a limited number of the available filters remains to be seem.

I am delighted to see a feature I have desired for ages, and that is rotated/scaled cloning. I've lost track of the number of times I've cursed it's absence. Wait and see, give it a year and you won't be able to live without it!

The Healing Brush tools have been improved too, which is more good news for photo restorers. Changes to the Channel Mixer and extended options for creating black & white images from colour will have obvious uses too.

I reserve judgement on whether it's worth the upgrade. At the moment, I have the feeling that it is, but I will post a more detailed review as soon as I get my copy.

-Mark.

Photo Restoration...it's not just about fixing things!

I have just been to a 100th birthday party for my wife's grandmother. She's an amazing woman, full of stories and anecdotes dating back to around the First World War. I had restored and coloured a photo of her for her 99th birthday that was originally taken on her 21st birthday, but I wanted to do something more to mark this landmark age for her 100th.

I eventually put together a souvenir booklet, wrote some background text for it and included a collection of restored photos that spanned her life. I got a number of copies digitally printed and was pleased with the results, given that I wasn't able to invest the time in it that I had wanted to. We handed out copies to all of the guests, some of them took an extra copy to send to relatives who couldn't make it. It went down very well, all in all.

As a result I got talking to someone at the party who had brought some very old photos with her. One of them was of my wife's great grandparents of whom we didn't think any photos existed. Of course I was thrilled with this 'find'. Much less thrilled to see how the photo had been treated...

The photograph had been removed from an album (where it had spent the best part of 100 years safe from harm) and was now residing in a cheap hole-punched plastic wallet, the kind you might find in a stationery shop. The photo was very faded and someone had aparently offered to "fix" it. Except that photo restoration wasn't what this person had in mind. Oh, no. Colur photocopying with some deft adjustment of the brightness controls was what this person had in mind! Needless to say, what was returned was a bigger, darker photocopy of a faded photograph.

Good intentions aside, the photograph ended up suffering more damage in the previous week than in the 100 years before that. Removed from the safely of its album it had curled around on itself to form a tube, and closing the lid of a photocopier on it (to flatten it out again) had caused it to crack down the middle, almost splitting it in two. At least I got the opportunity to do a full digital photo restoration on it before any more damage was done.

There is more to photo restoration than "fixing" old photos. For anyone interested in this activity, learning the right way to handle old photographs goes without saying. But we also have a responsibility to educate others in the treatment of these delecate scraps of paper, so that some of them may last another 100 years, waiting their turn for restoration.