Old Photos with bad 'silvering'

[Tim]

A couple of days ago I was asked by a customer to re-frame a couple of old maps her father had hanging on his office wall. He's long since passed away, and the frames weren't in much better shape. However, when we took apart the existing frames to remove the maps, the backing boards were discovered to be a couple of very old family photographs. I'll be putting some pictures up later, but in essence they're very badly 'silvered' (sorry - don't know the correct term), and in places almost look like negatives in certain light. Does anyone know of a way that these could be restored, either professionally or by scanning and Photoshopping? The customer isn't too worried about them, but would appreciate it if I could do ANYTHING!

Tim

[John]

I think I know what you mean Tim. I've attempted this type of restoration a few times using Photoshop with varying degrees of success. Have a look at the RGB channels of the scanned image, you will often find that one of the channels picks up much less of the silvering than others.

However there is a lot of help out there on the Internet. With the help of Google you are bound to turn up some useful tips.
Good luck, and be sure to let us know how you get on.

[WelshFramer]

Sounds like a good candidate for this month's competition. Post a scan of the photos and see who can come up with the best result.

[Not your average framer]

Silvering is a common problem with silver gelatine photographic prints. These prints fall into two types silver bromide and silver chloride. These days I can't remember what the difference between the two types would be.

Silvering is caused by migration of non-fixed silver which was not originally fully washed out after developing and fixing the print. Sometimes the prints would be toned to extend the life of the print and to possibly reduce the risk of silvering.

Old timers in the photography business may still know how to chemically correct this problem by washing out the unwanted (migrated) silver with a solution of sodium thiosulphate (Hypo) and ascorbic acid.

Unfortunately while this once commonly conducted procedure is very successful, the silvering can still return at some future point in time.

Silver gelatine print papers are still available and in use today, so it is still a relevent issue to these involved in this type of monochrome photography.

I used to mess around with this sort of thing in my pre-digital photography days, but it was a long time ago.

[Tim]

Well - scanning on my 'All-In-One' Lexmark didn't do them justice, since the backing boards are bigger than A4 and the scanning surface has a slight lip on it, so I'll have to wait until my new scanner arrives on wednesday (any excuse for a new toy)......watch this space...