The Transcription Team and Photo Restoration
The Transcription Team consists of volunteers from around Australia who type up old documents, gazettes, newspapers and other articles. This work is invaluable to researchers and historians as it creates searchable documents which can be indexed by Google and other search engines.
In the past, trawling through microfiche at the library took many many hours. Now, a quick 5 minute search of a document can reveal all references to a family name or subject matter.
Much gratitude is extended to the dedicated team who make this possible. Thousands of hours have been committed to accurate and faithful transcriptions of documents and TROVE newspapers. Two examples of their achievements are The Triangle Newspaper and Snapshot 1964.
Some of the team members use their hours to fulfil their Centrelink Mutual Obligation, using their time and skills to preserve our history and enhance your research experience. Please email if you are interested in joining the team.
Photos: digitising and restoring
You don’t have to be a museum archivist to look after your old photos properly.
Most people have an old shoebox of photos – inherited from deceased relatives – that “one day” they will deal with. One day never comes and they languish in the cupboard and often deteriorate with damp and dust.
For professionals the steps are: rescue; scan; store; catalogue; restore.
You don’t have to tackle it all at once – but a few easy steps will get you started.
Firstly rescue them from further deterioration – PARTICULARLY if they have been stored in those 1970s sticky albums.
Next, scan them at a HIGH resolution and save them as tif format. There are hundreds of videos on the internet to give you all the details on how to accomplish this but if you don’t have the time and equipment, send them to a professional or ask a teenager. Just do this one really important step!
I can’t tell you how many people came to me after the 2022 flood to try and rescue their precious memories. It was heartbreaking.
Once they are scanned, save them to a second backup hard disk and keep it off-site at your mums or neighbour’s place.
The other steps can wait until you have more time – just get them digistised!
A few words about resolution
Resolution is all about dots per inch – DPI
The higher the dpi, the more information the scanner will pick up and the clearer the image.
Scan at 600 dpi or above. You can always make a hi-res scan smaller but you cannot make a lo-res scan bigger without a significant deterioration in quality.
The higher the resolution – the higher the file size.
A photo scanned at 100dpi might be 1 megabyte.
Scanned at 600dpi will be 36 megabytes.
Restoring is the fun part. Yes, it requires graphic skills but to watch a repaired photo emerge from the chaos is very satisfying.
A word of warning about allowing artificial intelligence [AI] to automatically “improve” your photos. DON’T!!
Most phone cameras and some flatbed scanner software now try to apply filters as you scan the photo. They offer to colour balance and reduce noise but what you often end up with is a mess that doesn’t resemble the original picture.
As an example, this lady inherited facial hair due to an auto filter.
Turn off all enhance modes in scanner settings – just scan the picture warts and all.
It’s fine to play around with photo filters and airbrushing tools but always use a file copy and not the original scan.
Post-production AI is in its infancy and there are now dozens of sites where you can upload your photos for restoration. This is fine if you just want to take out scratches and stains but beware of asking AI to rebuild personal elements. The output is dependent on what instructions are given by the user and how the program was trained – how many millions of photos and which ethnic origins were used as reference.
AI is designed to please the customer – so it will give you what it thinks you want. It will recreate your family from old and discoloured photos but look carefully and you will notice distorted bodies and changed facial features.
With permission from Robert Weir – As an experiment he gave this prompt to ChatGPT to restore a newspaper clipping: “Enhance this old photo to look like it was taken with a modern DSLR camera. Improve lighting, sharpness, background blur (bokeh), and color tones to give it a realistic DSLR-quality look but do not alter or smooth the original facial features or expressions. Keep the faces exactly as they are to preserve identity and emotion.”
Quoting Robert about his results: “In a sense, the LLMs all did what they were trained to do. They created a higher quality version of a low quality original, closely matching the pose, the time period, and the general style of clothing. But it went beyond what could truly be determined from the original, including the all important facial details. Those were entirely fabricated. Curiously, all the prompts I did resulted in a woman quite a bit older than the original.
I think the basic problem is that lower quality version has less “information” in it. So, there are an infinite number of higher quality images that could, in theory, have been the source of the lower quality version. The AI makes a guess, a plausible, human-looking guess. That is, in a sense, quite amazing. But it is not going to be able to restore, in any real sense, what is lost.”
The technology will improve as it learns that (most) humans don’t have 6 fingers.
And it is learning fast as more people are testing its capabilities. It can, with the right prompts, produce some pretty amazing results – but don’t expect miracles.
AI is also improving rapidly with interpreting handwriting.
Before rushing off to use AI, give a thought to the environment and the water and other resources it uses. Give a thought to the millions of artists who have had their intellectual property stolen to train these ubiquitous LLMs. Give a thought to the accuracy of the results you will receive.
AI might be free – but someone/ something is paying for it.
If you have a special photo that you need scanned and restored by a human, please email to discuss your options.
