Hey all. I've recently begun trying to digitize old family photos. I'm going through boxes of pictures and scanning them all in. I have a pretty good epson scanner, and am scanning the photos at 1200dpi, with the scanner's dust removal and color correction options turned on.

Some pictures look bad on the original, but after scanning look much better. The auto color correction does wonders. However, the dust removal doesn't seem to do much.

This picture, for example, has lots of specs on it. The original looks perfect, with no odd specs or damage. Why when I scan it in am I getting these white spots, and what can I do to avoid them?

Aurock, welcome to Retouch Pro!
Scanners pick up tiniest specks that the eye can not see without a magnifying device. You should examine the image under a magnifying lense or jewellers loop to see if the specs are actually spots on the paper where the dyes are missing. The other thing to ensure is that fine particles of dust are not on the photo surface. If they are you should wipe them off or blow them away with compressed air.

You may not like the following suggestion, but here goes.
"Auto" anything in scanner s/w can be dangerous because when it guesses incorrectly, it often damages certain attributes of an image and the damage is often not reversible (over sharpening, blurring, contrast increase, etc). My recommendation is to turn off ALL scanner auto corrections - auto color, auto contrast, descreen, dust and scratches, auto levels, sharpening). Take a raw scan at a high resolution and bring it into Photoshop or other editing s/w and use the tools in the editing program to make all the adjustments.

Regards, Murray

I've been trying to watch to make sure the auto scanned image looks right, and in some cases I've scanned it without the corrections. Here's one example of the auto color correction from the scanner. Do you think it could be done better manually?

...
You may not like the following suggestion, but here goes.
"Auto" anything in scanner s/w can be dangerous because when it guesses incorrectly, it often damages certain attributes of an image and the damage is often not reversible (over sharpening, blurring, contrast increase, etc). My recommendation is to turn off ALL scanner auto corrections - auto color, auto contrast, descreen, dust and scratches, auto levels, sharpening). Take a raw scan at a high resolution and bring it into Photoshop or other editing s/w and use the tools in the editing program to make all the adjustments.

Regards, Murray

I second that

Wow... gorgeous work.

This is exactly the kind of correction I need on many of the photo's I'm scanning. I just need to learn how to do it! :)

I have
1. Split RGB channels
2. Ran Neat Image on blue & green channels left the red channel for sharpness preservation.
3. Lowered the brightness & increased the contrast on the red channel.
4. Adjusted the blue & green channels too
5. Combined the channels & run Color Washer.
6. Knocked out the faces & run iCorrect to equalize the colors
7. Blended them back in.
8. Used scratch remover
9. Run quick clarifier set on 2
…and I think that was it.

Thanks for the step by step. I'm going to try using that photo as a learning project then, following your directions. I'm completely new to photoshop, so that should help me get the hang of things a bit...

I have
1. Split RGB channels
2. Ran Neat Image on blue & green channels left the red channel for sharpness preservation.

To do this, do you save each channel as a seperate image?

I saved as a new image, increased the color depth, ran the neat image & pasted back to the channel image, flatten it & ready to combine.

hi,
you probably already check this out.. but have you cleaned the plate glass lately? I had a problem a few month ago I started getting speck on the scans and the original picture was good and it turned out there was some dust particles on the scanner plate glass...

Hey all. I've recently begun trying to digitize old family photos. I'm going through boxes of pictures and scanning them all in. I have a pretty good epson scanner, and am scanning the photos at 1200dpi, with the scanner's dust removal and color correction options turned on.

Some pictures look bad on the original, but after scanning look much better. The auto color correction does wonders. However, the dust removal doesn't seem to do much.

This picture, for example, has lots of specs on it. The original looks perfect, with no odd specs or damage. Why when I scan it in am I getting these white spots, and what can I do to avoid them?

Yes, I've cleaned the scanner glass often, as it tends to pick up smudges and gunk as I go thru these photos.

I have
1. Split RGB channels
2. Ran Neat Image on blue & green channels left the red channel for sharpness preservation.
3. Lowered the brightness & increased the contrast on the red channel.
4. Adjusted the blue & green channels too
5. Combined the channels & run Color Washer.
6. Knocked out the faces & run iCorrect to equalize the colors
7. Blended them back in.
8. Used scratch remover
9. Run quick clarifier set on 2
…and I think that was it.

Are there any tutorials or guides that explain how to do thse things? I've gone thru many of the tutorials here, but they all seem to assume a basic knowledge of how to get to the various functions of photoshop.

I'm starting from scratch. I'm good with computers in general, and a pretty quick learner, but Photoshop is (other than the basic tools) different than anything I've worked with before.

Based on your steps above, I got as far as saving the blue and green as seperate images and bringing them into 'Neat Image', but I Neat Image didn't seem like it was doing anything. It said it couldn't find a plain area of the picture, and when I click to the output image screen, it doesn't look significantly different than the input image, if at all.

Did you change the mode or it still is a grayscale image?

For the blue & Green copies? They are still greyscale.

Edit: It is greyscale, but the image mode shows that it's RGB.

I just ran it again, and looking closer, it does appear to have cleared up grainy dots over the image, just not as much of the specs and such as I expected it to.

I just realized color washer is a commercial plugin, not something part of photoshop. $50... wow. How would I go about color correction without that?

You could use some tutorials posted in this forum... like this one (http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=62)

Just for fun I used "lowly" variations Adjustment. A bright curve adjustment finished up running it thru Noiseware.
Some times I can't really pin point what color is causing the problems so I'll run the variations adjustment since it gives dif. sample of adding or subtracting colors.

Lasa

Okay, the colors still look a bit off, but I've gotten it better. Here are 2 versions I've been working with, what do you think?

I used a LOT of healing brush on these to try and clear up the white spots all over the photo, is there a better way to do it? How'd I do?

I think I'm getting pretty close, especially with the last one, but it seems like I've lost a bit of focus/detail, especially on the left face.

Aurock, welcome to Retouch Pro!
Scanners pick up tiniest specks that the eye can not see without a magnifying device. You should examine the image under a magnifying lense or jewellers loop to see if the specs are actually spots on the paper where the dyes are missing. The other thing to ensure is that fine particles of dust are not on the photo surface. If they are you should wipe them off or blow them away with compressed air.

You may not like the following suggestion, but here goes.
"Auto" anything in scanner s/w can be dangerous because when it guesses incorrectly, it often damages certain attributes of an image and the damage is often not reversible (over sharpening, blurring, contrast increase, etc). My recommendation is to turn off ALL scanner auto corrections - auto color, auto contrast, descreen, dust and scratches, auto levels, sharpening). Take a raw scan at a high resolution and bring it into Photoshop or other editing s/w and use the tools in the editing program to make all the adjustments.

Regards, Murray

Yes, exactly and a big consideration is that you should save a scan that is as close to the original photograph as possible so that in future you can work from a duplicate of this scan...never from the original scan. That way you will always have a digital "original" for later in case you want to do something different or lose the photo. If you have used any auto settings on your scanner this will not be possible.

Another consideration is in which file format to save your scan and at what resolution to scan photographs for future printing...I save my original scan in .bmp and generally scan at 300 dpi...this makes for a big file but you don't lose any information...

After I have made an "original scan" and saved it, sometimes I will play with the settings in my scanner, but I always make a straight scan first.