hello everybody,

i hope someone can help me with my question even though im quiet new to the forum, well lets see ;)


i have several old black&white pictures that have those typical vertical stripes, which make recoloring very tough :(
is there a good way of removing those annoying stripes?

thanks for any constructive help!



i added a picture showing the stripes (added some red lines as example):

You can try out NeatImage or NoiseNinja -- they will make a half-decent attempt at removing/reducing the stripes, although not perfect.

yes hello Leah, thanks for the reply but i already used neatimage and all it removes is the "noise", the "pixel dust" so to speak. it doesnt remove those geometrical patterns/stripes.
well i take it from your answer than that theres no soluton for the problem :-(

I tried it with NeatImage using the Remove artifacts -> Filter more of thin lines Filter Preset and it did reduce or remove the lines.

Hi limaze,

I gave it a try ...

What I did is:

Duplicated the background, setting the blending to Darken and nudged it a bit until the stripes nearly disappeared.

Added a Layer Mask > Hide All to the duplicate, and with a white brush, I painted over the stripes to minimize them.

Duplicated the duplicate Layer + Mask (keeping the blending to Darken),and nudged it a bit more.

Merged visible, here (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showpost.php?p=68680&postcount=9) is a tip on how to do it without losing the underlying Layers ...

Run it through Neat Image (very soft setting).

I didn't touch your red stripes as several of the white ones were perfectly visible.

Hope this helps...

:wavey: