A friend ask me to recover this picture. I scanned it in at 600 dpi. I'm new at this and only have Photoshop CS2. I've tried some things and get some sort of image out but with no sucess. Any help would be appreciated.

you mentioned 600ppi .. this is 72ppi ... did you scan this for us at 72?
If so I'd suggest opening the raw 600ppi scan and reducing that to 72ppi then try posting it... Better yet perhaps just post a smaller section of the 600ppi as it was scanned.

It appears to be a tintype, (that is: a photograph made on a sheet of iron and coated with dark enamel). Anyway, you need to lighten the image. You can do this by adding curves or level adjusting and changing the blending mode to screen (if necessary you can duplicate this adjustment layer and adjust the opacity). This will reveal the true condition of the photo.

It must be scan it again... :cry:
[Even without the frame]

It is possible to bring out the image, but as the others said, it must be rescanned. What is that strange pattern across the image (yet not the frame)?

Used AstraImage to edit the FFT. Masked off the vertical lines. Applied DDP to enhance the tone and blurred a little. I would rather leave it at this stage as I won't be able to retouch the photo back to its original look and feel.

I am pretty new at this so please bare with me. I scanned the image at 600 DPI and then resized it to post. That strange pattern that comes out when I use levels is something I don't understand.
If I re-scan it, what DPI should I use? I thought the bigger the better. Also if I scan it as a gray scale would that be better? When I scanned it as a gray scal there wan't much levels could do.
It may be that there just isn't anything that can be done. The picture is in some sort of cardboard frame. And is just as black as can be.

Hi BillD,

One thing to do is to post a scan without any adjustment made to it at all - you say the strange pattern comes out when you use levels, so instead scan it without ANY automatic settings, and in colour, and don't apply any level adjustments, then post it here again. As to what resolution to scan - yes - 600dpi is good (though not much point going higher) but just so you can do the final high quality restore with maximum detail. Lower res is fine to post here (in fact you really don't have any choice to get under the 100k limit). 'Save for web' which I'm presuming you are using, converts the jpg to web resolution automatically so no need to scan at the lower resolution.

That pattern is strange, so if you can post without that adjustment setting we may be able to get to the bottom of it...

I’ve been playing with FFT RGB and I have been using this picture to play with, just to see what is possible.

BillD
Everyone here is waiting for you to post a better scan before they start on this picture. It has a very strange ‘Pattern’ on the image but it is not on the mount so maybe this is the best you can get from this.

I am posting this to show what is possible from your image. It’s NOT good but it is a big improvement.

Levels
FFT RGB
Gaucian blur on background
Lighten Blouse


Ken

This is scanned and only resized for posting. Let me say thanks for all your help.
Cameraken, what is FFT RGB? I know I will fee stupid when youtell me but ...

Thanks again,
Bill

Boy - you've got a tough one there!

This is a channel mix using red and green channels. Auto levels with a selection on the photo only. Minimal dust & scratches filter, soft Neat Image noise reduction.

Hope someone else can do better than me!

Photoshop. No need to feel dumb about not knowing FFT - it's one of the most mindbaffling filters around! Search the forum for FFT and you'll find a number of lengthy threads about it. I didn't actually try it on this photo.

BillD

FFT is a way of removing the texture or pattern from an image. If you want to learn about it you could start where I did here.

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10660

There will be a tutorial on it here at RetouchPro very shortly.

In the meantime I’ve attached two samples. One is your second scan (which is not much better than your first one But the blue channel is cleaner) And the second is with FFT.
There is still much to do to this.

Ken

i gave this one a shot also. i'm really beginning to hate scanners and scan lines.

i went all over the place on this one... levels, curves, histogram, histogram adjustment, histogram stretch, more curves, clarify, clone, copy clone, salt and pepper noise reduction, gausian blur and repeating some of the above more than once.

for a midway treatment, i started a new reduced area image after getting some of the contrasts and curves better and then started working with clone to clean up that really damaged area in his top left hair area. that led to cleaning up some of his face and clothing. then i did a copy clone, setting the tool on the first image and copying that over to the working image to get back some detail. that put back some of the scan lines, but i decided i'd rather have the detail than remove the scan lines, so i left it there.

tricky picture.

Craig

Thanks everyone for your efforts. I was afraid this picture was too far gone. You guys have brought back more than I thought would ever show again. I have so much to learn. I'm happy to find this place and I know I can learn a lot here.
I'll take the lesson you have shared and keep working on it. If I get something that deserves a post I'll put it back up.
Thanks

Old pictures are scary looking.

Wow! I'm impressed with how far everyone brought this picture. I want to go to Photoshop Bootcamp somewhere / anywhere! This is a great group but I think I would benefit even more if I had more of a foundation to build on.

Hiya all :)

First post for me. I was browsing the board the last few days and this thread caught my attention.
Out of all the pictures around this one was my no.1 choice to check what I can do with such pictures.
So what do you think? Any ideas for improvement?
_______
:bandit: Drach

That is simply amazing. I wish I knew enought to get this picture to this point. Very nice work. Did you do this is just Photoshop or did you use other programs/plug-ins?
Thanks for the post and the help. I just have to learn how to do this. My friend is going to be very happy.

Not sure if you pointed that last post at me, but I used only Photoshop with standard filters.

I used layer-shifting to eliminate those ugly lines. Drawback is, that the image becomes a little blurry, but it wasn't that bad in this case. There was still some distortion which I got rid of with a very slight gaussian blur.
Now it's even more unsharp (still not too bad), but a little trick helps here. Since the background has no important detail, the best bet is to blur it more than the child. By doing so the child appears sharper than it really is ;)
The rest is more or less shifting around curves and some painting (well, the paintwork was done before the bluring, but you get the point :) ).

I guess that's some very unusual technique and I know it doesn't work always, but I consider myself still a newbie so I think that's ok :dizzy:

Drach

Welcome to RetouchPro

You wanted “Any ideas for improvement”. Well after all that work and the excellent job on the hair I cannot understand why you have not punched up the levels a little. Also you could have used the right eye to improve the left. But this is nit picking and you have done an absolutely excellent job.

This may be your first posting here but obviously not your first retouching project.

If you have done this all in Photoshop then you have got an amazing result.

If you look back in this thread I have used FFT (Fourier Transform) to remove the texture from this image. You say you have used “layer-shifting to eliminate those ugly lines”. Well I did a Google search on layer shifting and got a load of geology sites – Nothing about Photoshop.

It sounds like you have made some sort of mask to eliminate the texture’ If that is the case then I (for one) would be very interested in your Method.


Ken

Thanks for the welcome :classic:

I played around with the levels, but this looked best to me. Anyway I'll try around some more and will try to work on the eye.

I guess layer-shifting isn't the right word, but that was my best translation for it :tongue:
I duplicated the layer, set transparency of the top-layer to 50% and shifted it (2 up and 1 left I think it was). This also works nicely on high-res scans, where you can almost see the printed dots ;)

Actually this was my first real retouching work if we're talking about restoring old photos, tho I'm doing graphics a pretty long time and made a lot forum signatures in the past years (I was playing MMOs a lot). I guess that helped a lot :wink:

Drach

Thanks for explaining your method. I have done some tests and FFT is the winner.

The first problem with your method is that you are distorting the image slightly (1 or 2 pixels)

Second you have to do further blurring to remove the remaining texture.

I am attaching two samples. The first is layer-stretched and levels. The second is FFT and levels.


Ken