Video: Using Photoshop and AI to restore 110-year-old glass negatives: Digital photography review

Whether he make beetroot juice, taken with a lens made of ice or adjusted one of his ‘weird’ lenses, photographer Mathieu Stern is no stranger to creating and sharing similarly oriented photography videos on his YouTube channel. For his latest video, Stern shares how he restored a 110-year-old glass negative using Photoshop and a little help from artificial intelligence.

After acquiring a pair of glass dish negatives taken in Great Britain in 1910, Stern said he wanted to learn more about the woman in the photographs. So he did what any aristocratic scholar would want and spent countless hours studying Victorian glass panels at Collection of Glass Negatives by David Knights-Whittome located at the Sutton Archives in the United Kingdom

One of Stern’s negatives was framed before photographing it with his Sony a7 III and Laowa Macro lens.

During his arduous study of glass negatives, he says he’s chosen a theme. While many photographs of the time showed their subjects looking very stern, almost stern, around the turn of the 20th century, people started taking more portraits with their pets. According to Stern, he observed that people photographed with their pets seemed to show more smiles and emotion than those without their pets, a detail notable when the subject in the glasses his negative is smiling in both pictures, including one with her. French bulldog.

With this information in hand, Stern began his recovery process. First, he photographed a glass negative with a Sony a7 III camera, a Laowa 15mm F4 Macro lens, a glass plate to hang the negative, and what appears to be an old iPad turned into a special lightbox.

Before and after comparison of the subject’s face after Stern using the AI ​​image assistant.

After capturing the image, he feeds it into Photoshop to turn it into a positive image before cloning as many imperfections as possible. Once satisfied with the state of the image, he first ran the subject’s face through an AI-powered enhancement engine to sharpen the subject’s face. Then he overlays the super-sharp image over the original and merges the two together. Then, Stern started grading, using an AI-powered color correction tool and a photo of Keira Knightly as a guide for how different colors and tones in the photo should look.

The final photos have been restored. Mathieu Stern’s photo.

In the end, Stern was left with only a pair of beautifully restored images, modernizing a still photograph taken more than a century ago. You can find more of Stern’s work in our DPR archive and stay up to date with his latest videos and content on His YouTube channel and Strange Lens Museum Website. You can also support his efforts on his Patreon profile.