Photo Restoration - - Photo film texture removal advice.

sev · #1 10-23-2005, 04:59 AM

Firstly I'd like to say hello to you all, I've been guided to this site and it's superb!.

I have been given an old photo to restore by my mother. The photo is of her mother and was taken for an identity card in the fifties.

The photo is only one and a half inches square - a passport photo size, and is covered with stamp marks in the lower corner and cracking. It's the only photo of my grandmother that is left in the whole family.

I scanned it in and realised that it had picked up all the texture on the photographic paper, and this is my biggest bugbear at the moment.

I read the excellent tutorial about useing the FFT filter and downloaded it. My Photoshop CS running on a mac won't recognise it. Is there any other way of getting hold of a mac compatible filter for PS? (i've trawled the net with not much joy - learn't a lot about astronomical photography though!)

Alternatively, how have other users managed to eliminate the dreaded textures?

(i've included an image of the original and a detail close up of the texture)

thanks in advance

Sev

smiley guy · #2 10-23-2005, 06:36 AM

I just did a quick dl of the pic and tried a surface blur with the following settings:
radius:6
threshold: 13

Also added a little gaussian blur to the background only via a quick selection.

Seemed to do a nice job. Could do with a history brush or erase to the layer below to restor some facial detail but generally not bad. I didn't touch any of the other problems, just dealt with the question at hand.

Panpan · #3 10-23-2005, 08:11 AM

Since you have the original photo, here are two suggestions.

You could rephotograph the image with lighting that minimizes the texture. That's possibly lighting close to 90 degrees to the surface.

The other thing you could try is to rescan the image oriented 180 degrees to the first scan. You then register the two images in photoshop layers. The idea is the fact that the scanner light and sensor are offset causes a problem when there is 3d texture. It shows up as highlights and shadows. Those artefacts should cancel out when superposed.

In the attached file, I lightened the eye area, gambling that the dark eyesockets are due to bad lighting. You or your mother would know if that is the case or if your grandmother had darker skin around the eyes.

Pierre

Duv · #4 10-23-2005, 09:01 AM

Hi Sev. Welcome aboard!!

If you go to this forum's tutorial section, you'll find one by Flora called "Removing Paper Texture from Old Photos". I tried it on yours and got good results. A bit of experimenting and you should get even better results.

Cheers

Dave

Cassidy · #5 10-23-2005, 09:09 AM

another thing you could try is running the high pass filter on a duplicate layer, just sufficient to show the pattern and then invert the filter and apply in overlay mode, I did this twice with quite acceptable removal of pattern, as in I duplicated the first overlay high pass

sev · #6 10-23-2005, 03:29 PM

Thanks very much for all your input.

Smiley Guy , I liked you result, tell me, what do you mean by surface blur?, I can't find it in the blur menu.

Panpan this looks great, I get the feeling that the photo was originally retouched in order to produce the identity card image initially. Tell me how much did you lighten the eye area by, and what process did you use?

Duv I read the tutorial, but the filters don't work on the mac version of photoshop! but your rendition of the image is really good- I can see that there is a lot to learn!

Cassidy I Have tried this, and am getting pleasing results - do you duplicate the high pass layer twice over?

thanks for all your help

realaqu · #7 10-23-2005, 04:41 PM

Hi,

I didn't fix the entire picture, just did the first step to remove the texture,
my way is pretty easy

1 duplicate the background
2 changed layer mode of your copy to lighten
3 press V, select move tool, move around til the texture disappear
4 flatten the image, use hitory brush recover those areas need details, like eyes, her hair.

my work stopped here, the next step for you is just
zoom in, use whatever tools you like to fix those parts, healing brush, stamps, doge and burn.

now you can start regular restoration job

hope this could help a little

Realaqu

Panpan · #8 10-23-2005, 06:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sev

Panpan this looks great, I get the feeling that the photo was originally retouched in order to produce the identity card image initially. Tell me how much did you lighten the eye area by, and what process did you use?

I first loosely selected the eyesockets with a feather of 5, pressed ctrl-j to copy them to a screen-blend layer with 35% opacity.
I then alt-clicked on the layer icon at the bottom of the layers tab. This brought up a dialog box where I selected soft-light blend mode and checkmarked "fill with soft-light-neutral color (50% gray)". On this layer, I painted with a 10% white brush to lighten the eyesockets and with a 10% black brush to darken the eye pupils.
Can you confiirm that your grandmother suffered a burn to her mouth and chin or did I make a retouching mistake?

Pierre

Cameraken · #9 10-23-2005, 06:48 PM

Hi Sev
Welcome to Retouch Pro

There IS a mac version. It’s called ImageJ

Image J is part of The Image Processing Toolkit
Available Here for Free
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/download.html
ImageJ runs on Linux, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Windows
The Docs are here
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/docs/
And the bit about FFT is here
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/docs/menus/process.html#fft

It is Not a plugin but a complete program. You will need Java Installed.

Ken

smiley guy · #10 10-23-2005, 08:59 PM

Hi Sev,

Thanks for the kind words, that means a lot to me!

Surface blur may not be in PSCS, I am working with PSCS2 and it is in the bottom of the blur menu at: filter->blur->surface blur.

I hope that helps.

Duv · #11 10-23-2005, 10:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sev

Duv I read the tutorial, but the filters don't work on the mac version of photoshop! but your rendition of the image is really good- I can see that there is a lot to learn!
thanks for all your help

You don't have to use Neat Image. Noise Ninja, Grain Surgery and others will work with Mac I'm sure. Gauss Blur, noise,etc, certainly are in Mac PS.

Cheers

Dave

sev · #12 11-11-2005, 04:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cameraken

Hi Sev
Welcome to Retouch Pro

There IS a mac version. It’s called ImageJ

Image J is part of The Image Processing Toolkit
Available Here for Free
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/download.html
ImageJ runs on Linux, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Windows
The Docs are here
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/docs/
And the bit about FFT is here
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/docs/menus/process.html#fft

It is Not a plugin but a complete program. You will need Java Installed.

Ken

Hi Ken,

I've downloaded the imageJ - how did you get that superb result? it's exactly the look i'm trying to achieve. Did you use imageJ for this, and if so what sequenc of commands did you use...?

thanks for all your help..

Cameraken · #13 11-12-2005, 02:54 PM

Hi Sev

Yes. I did use ImageJ to do this (Although I prefer to use FFT-RGB because in Windows/Photoshop it is a plug-in which is quicker to use.

Load the picture into ImageJ
Process>FFT>FFT
You will see the FFT as in my attachment1
Doubleclick the Paintbrush tool and choose a brush width of 20

Paint out the 4 stars in black as in attachment2
Process>FFT>Inverse FFT
And Save the results.

You should now have the image virtually texture free as in Attachment3

You will notice that ImageJ keeps the colour (unlike FFTrgb) so you don’t need to put the colour back in.

I have dumped my original picture. But from there I went on to clean up the picture.
I think I desaturated it and re-toned it to even out the colour.
Lightened the eyes and added a hint of colour. I will probably have used neat Image as well.

Hope this helps.

Ken