田先生 | Mr. Tian

Kodak Safety Film 53 negative restoration. Digital Process. Fine Art — Reproduction and Finishing detail will follow | Portrait was taken in Glodok, Jakarta 20 May 1957.

Thought Process

Archiving

Photographed in 1957 and has always been kept in a plastic sleeve and brown paper folder. The archival method resulting the poor condition of the negative. Impacting bubbles and high chemical smell. The current condition of the negative is considered as damaged with film coat still preserved pretty well thus the image inversion still gave relevance and chance for digital restoration.

Investigation

As seen on the negative, there has been several retouching made throughout the journey. One of them is the skin retouching where tint treatment has been added, verdict is on adding a skin tone or reducing the highlight on it. Potentially the previous printer was refining his/her wetprints through this process.

Treatment

We decided to keep the negative as is and take the digital restoration for the time being. High resolution scanning has not been done yet as we are still looking and taking advises from the experts. Currently the resulting digital restoration has been made through photographing the negative with a 16mp camera and translating that into a 4:3 digital image, max width of 30cm print.