Remove a texture from an Scanned Image

[Neville310]

Here's a similar thread to "Fixing a strange texture on this old photo." But the last thread did not fully relate to my restoration and left out key steps in the process.

Attached is a cropped area from the image. The photograph was scanned from a textured print, which appears as a bas relief (like a canvas). I would like to remove this texture to help with noise reduction and sharping the photo. Please let me know any techniques for removing this paper texture.

This area gives you an idea about the texture. Hopefully, you could readily see the texture in this low resolution image. The initial scan was over 26mb since I am hoping to output this image to film and frame it as a gift. I already spent considerable time fixing cracks and imperfections with the scanned image. I prefer to learn the process for removing this texture; since my creative direction is uncertain and the restoration may contain imperfections in the final output (the photo is far from ideal).

[Lasa]

The image can be passed thru basically any noise removing software and it will clean up or use any of the method discribed on this forum...
but you don't want to remove all the noise or texture it won't look right. All images have some noise/texture it give the images depth.
This particular image has been blown up to see the noise but at a normal distance it actually helps create the image.
Just my thought.

lasa

[Juergen D]

You can try making a second scan of the original, upside down. Rotate it and place it over the first scan and adjust the opacity. It may help.

Juergen

[CharlesBell]

Apply Gaussian Blur.
Also the Dust and Scratched tool under Noise Filters in PhotoshopCS2 does similar things.

[philbach]

Well I applied levels and then Neat Image to the snippet you posted. It appears that the original has a lot of texture. As previously mentioned perhaps you can scan it upside down. There is a nice tutorial on the subject in the tutorial section here.

[CharlesBell]

You lost detail in eye. It went dark.

[philbach]

You are correct it did go dark. To do restore work I would always copy the file and in addition copy the layer. On the copied layer I usually apply a mask which can be used to mask things that go wrong like a dark eye. Good pick up.

[Kraellin]

interesting picture and texture. i tried a lot of different things on this, but kept coming up short of what i wanted. mostly what i was doing was broad filters and tools. i finally realized that wasnt going to do it.

so, after starting over about 6 times, i finally came up with this:

curves adjustment layer set to contrast. this brings out the detail, but it also brings out more of the texture. still, i wanted that picture detail.

after that it was a LOT of brush work. first i used the soften brush. not smudge. the soften brush in psp is like a very, very light smudge in that it sort of softens the textures into each other.

next was a bit of smudging. but this was only in the broad areas. i didnt want to smudge a dark into a light. so, if the area was mostly all the same tones i used the smudge on it to smooth it out.

after that i used the burn tool to heighten some of the darks.

after that i used the push tool on a medium to low setting. this was to get some of the more persistent areas and to straighten and define some of the edges.

then came some airbrushing. again, this was to add some more definition in spots and to fix the eyes. if you study the eyes close up you'll notice that the iris and whites have been covered over with some black splotches. airbrushing corrected that.

and somewhere during the 'push' stage, i used an unsharp mask to bring some sharpness back.

for the final steps i used a little more airbrush and push in the detail work.

there's more that could be done, but this got rid of the heavy texturing, so i'm ending off here.

oh, and welcome to RP, neville

[unimatrix001]

very tough texture, I ran decrack action twice both set at 0.3 then ran fft action painted small area near all 4 sides of the center cross. used selective color to enhance the blacks and whites. ran high pass filter set at 3.5, finally used unmask sharpen set at 65, 5.2, 0 and i came up with this. on the second image i added back some grain from the original image and then used neat image to smooth and sharpen just a little