Hi

I have an old school photograph that has been scanned but I need to remove the horizontal lines and tidy up a tad.

Any help would be appreciated or if you could point me in the right direction for a tutorial.

Thanks

It's my opinion that you should try a different scanner (or even a digital camera) if at all possible... I think the scanner used for this image is either dirty or has other problems and that's where the lines come from. They're in every color channel so my first thought would be spending a LOT of time with the healing brush and clone stamp tool to fix the lines if I wasn't able to get a better scan.

Thanks....

This is the only copy I was given and I thought it may involve plenty of cloning and healing.

Cheers anyway

Hi there

Depends on how good you want it… Below I applied a good dose of noise reduction then a little dodge and burn where needed.

Time is all holding you back

Butch

make a duplicate of the background, convert that copy's blend mode to 'multiply' and then add an adjustment layer of 'brightness/contrast' and raise the lightness a bit to taste. it shld hide most of the banding and lose no data through 'noise reduction' (which happens sometimes). you may lose a little luminance if you only adjust a tiny bit and you may still see the banding if you go too high, so, try to find a nice median. and, you can also do a bit of dodge and burn if necessary.

if that's not good enough, you could also try the fft filter and see how that goes.

oh, and welcome to RetouchPRO :)

Greetings to all

This was a challenge. First I tried noise reduction, but using sufficient to remove the lines seriously impaired the image. The FFT filter isn't viable. There's not sufficient regularity in the lines to form any distinguishable pattern of the type required for FFT to be effective. Kraellin's aproach worked best of the conventional methods but tended to leave a set of faces in a sea of darkness. The dark uniforms just merged into blackness.

So my method... I took a thin vertical strip from the left hand side of the image and ran it through the user-defined filter with a horizontal row of '1' cells and a weighting of 5 to maintain the same luminance. I used the filter multiple times until the details smeared into horizontal bands. Since the banding we want to eliminate is horizontal to start with the filter kept the banding while smearing out everything else. I then stretched the thin strip horizontally to the full width of the image. That gave me a layer with effectively only the banding on it. Inverting that layer and overlaying in on the original allowed me to cancel out most of the banding without harm to the underlaying details. The example shown has been processed above the divider and is original beneath it. The cancelling has to be done in horizontal slices on each change of underlaying luminance in the initial strip. I used four slices for the full height of the image to reasonable success.

Graham Plain

Would FFT/IFFT work for this? But I'm not exactly sure what to look for after FFT.

I used surface blur and that seemed to help.