Newspaper to photo

[yuppicide]

Need some help.. hopefully before Saturday so I can go print this photo out before a party on sunday.

Below is an attached scan of my Uncle.. R.I.P. It's the only good facial shot we have of him and my Grandmother and some of the family want copies of it. Unfortunately all I have for the picture is out of a newspaper. I scanned it in at 300dpi.

I wanna know what you guys would do to restore it. You can see the dots from the newspaper.. Right under the eyes (you can really see it under the right eye) was a crease in the newspaper. On the bottom and top was a piece of scotch tape, which is why you can see a difference in color.

Here's two copies of it.. one is about 950k in size and is 300dpi:
http://www.yuppicide.com/other/frank300.jpg

.. and here's one in 150dpi which is about 250k in size:

http://www.yuppicide.com/other/frank150.jpg

.. and I still have it saved on my hard drive in .PSD if anyone wants.

Being that the print size is so small do you think there is anything I can do or any program I can use to nicely print the photo at 4x6?! I'm thinking your answer is going to be no, but I thought I'd ask. If I can't print it at 4x6 I'll print it at a smaller size and put it in a cute little frame for everyone.

Your help is most appreciated and I give you my thanks in advance.

[deadants]

Hi yuppicide,
I had the same problem last year with halftone dots. What I did was to scan it at 1200dpi then reduced the image size. this tend to pull the dots so close together you can hardly see them then just add a slight gaussian blur

deadants

[yuppicide]

Aww man!! You serious?! I paid $7.99 to scan that crap on lol and another $7.99 for them to put it on CD. 3 of these and I could have bought myself a scanner! Wow that gaussian blur did a great job so far.

I notice his nose seems a bit discolored too. How hard is it to bring color to the picture?!

[deadants]

It was just a rough demo of how to do it. Boy, $7.99 they saw you coming. You wouldn't have to much problem with the colour. you just need to get that big scan, then you have something to work on. Give me a couple of minutes and I'll whack some colour on this demo.

deadants

[yuppicide]

Well, I was going to have him do it in 600dpi, but I was like dpi isn't going to increase the print size so I said forget it.

Heh.. do you think it's worth it if I go back tommorow when another guy is there and say "yeah I was supposed to get the 1200dpi scan we tried also, but he must have forgot to save it for me" lol. 'Cause it's $7.99 for first scan, $2 for additional scan. I'd rather pay $2 than $7.99 anyday.

I actually have a scanner here, but it SUCKS BALLS.. it's an HP all in one printer scanner copier, but it's the older generation.. PSC 750. I'll go try a 1200 scan anyway.

[deadants]

If it does 1200 you should be ok. Here's a quick and dirty colour job.

deadants

[yuppicide]

Wow.. can I ask how you did that so fast?! Special program or plug-in or just Photoshop?!

I scanned it in 1200dpi, but it looks crappier if you ask me compaired to what the other scanner did.

I did 3 scans.. one b&w, one grayscale, one color to see which came out best.

[deadants]

After I srunk the photo and turned it to grayscale, I then changed to cmyk mode. Then selected the the face with the marquee tool, Made a curves adjustmt layer and pushed and pulled the curve on the different colours ie. cyan, magenta, yellow and black. If you try it, don't forget to deselect the eyes and mouth otherwise they get the skin colour as well. then you do the harir and cut out the background and put in a gradient fill.

p.s. you need a new adjustment layer for each new coloured element.

deadants

[yuppicide]

Awesome. Damn right I'm gonna try it. LOL! Right now as a matter of fact.

[deadants]

Here's a picture from our local rag I just scanned. You can see that the left is at 1200dpi and the right has been reduced in size till the dots merge into a solid picture.

Here's the link to the cmyk colourize tutorial.
http://www.worth1000.com/tutorial.asp?sid=161018&page=3

This is how I do all my colourizing now. It's so easy when you get the hang of it.

[yuppicide]

But if you reduce the pixels then it reduces the print size as well and it'll be like 1/2 inch in size.

[deadants]

Are you using photoshop? If you are, after you have reduced the photo and it looks ok, save it. Then do a print with preview. you should be able to adjust it up or down in size to suit.

[deadants]

This is what It sould look like.

[yuppicide]

Using Photoshop CS. If I look at your last photo it appears you've enlarged the photo..

Oh.. I just saw you're going into print with preview.. I thought you were using the image size.

[yuppicide]

See whenver I used the curve tool.. I've always done it from RGB.. never CMYK. I also never noticed until now the three points on the tool. I've only used to notice the middle one and drag it to the top left or bottom right and see the results.

I just noticed there's three dots. I just get mad at the thing when I push and pull and can't get a good color out of it or when I push and pull it and I must have offset the other and it comes out close to the original again.

[yuppicide]

Wow.. this tutorial is great also:

http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=128

Not just for coloring stuff, but instead of using the lasso tool to select a section.. I'm now going to use this method to easier select an area! With the lasso tool I often sometimes get a good area going then mess up with a jagged mouse movement. With the other tool that you can put points down with the lasso tool I find it takes too long.

[Flora]

Hi,

I'm in a big hurry right now ... I'll work more on this picture later today ... just wanted to show you what can be achieved with the FFT filter in cases like this ..... In this Thread you can see another sample of FFT on newspaper scans ...

Attachment 1 = Original scan (I used the big size)
Attachment 2 = FFT only
Attachment 3 = FFT+Neat Image.

[deadants]

FFT is the way to go. I'll scour the web to find an FFT plugin for OS X even if I die in the attempt

[Caitlin]

I gave it another go - and indeed it works like magic (Don't know what I was doing wrong last time as I had no 'stars' - maybe the wrong kind of noise in the picture I was working on that the time?)

Can anyone give me a pointer to something that explains what these filters/technique actually do?? I'm the kind of person that like to understand what the tool is doing, not just the result, so I can judge better what it is likely to work for etc. At the moment it seems to be in the relms of black magic! *lol*

[philbach]

After downloading your picture I ran a median filter in photoshop. I copied that layer and ran neat image on the copied layer and then blended it.

[Ken Fournelle]

I have OSX and never have been able to get FFT to work. Have any other Mac people used FFT on their systems?

K

[philbach]

I'm a Mac user too. I don't believe FFT is available for the Mac. If it is I would like to know about it.

[yuppicide]

Looks like the program has pretty good results. I'll have to try it when I get home from work. I'm also going to print out Deadants colorized version too since I can't seem to make my own colorized. I'll print out one colorized, one b/w and see which one everyone likes best.

[byRo]

Originally Posted by Caitlin

Can anyone give me a pointer to something that explains what these filters/technique actually do?? I'm the kind of person that like to understand what the tool is doing, not just the result, so I can judge better what it is likely to work for etc. At the moment it seems to be in the relms of black magic! *lol*

Have a look at these threads:
http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/image-help/9373-scanned-old-photo-texture.html;
http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/image-help/9271-color-shift-honeycomb-texture-mold-problem-tackle-first.html;
http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/image-help/10441-another-fft-question.html.

If you want to know more, just ask!

Rô

[Flora]

Tried colorizing ... here is what I managed to do with the picture...

[yuppicide]

Beautiful job. I'm going to see how it prints out.. the left side prints a little dark on my Epson Photo Stylus R200.

[arcadhia]

Good job Flora!

[creeduk]

I am amazed how far you were able to take this image it looks great. I just did a job making new images look like newspaper images and here we are making newspaper back to photos funny old world