Photo Restoration - - Damaged film from Africa

swkmom · #1 10-01-2007, 01:56 PM

I was given a CD of photos that were recently taken in Africa. The disc was marked "due to heat & humidity" this is basically what you get. The photos are yellowed and grainy. Is there any way to restore the images? I can remove the discoloration, but I'm at a loss about the graininess. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Swampy · #2 10-01-2007, 03:05 PM

Post a good size (keep it under 100kb) sample and let us take a look at it.

unimatrix001 · #3 10-01-2007, 06:41 PM

you could try using noiseware and adjusting the about of noise removal or try grain surgery 2 have an option to remove the grain, and then one to let you match the grain to put it back in with adjustments

swkmom · #4 10-01-2007, 09:32 PM

Here is a sample of what the pictures look like.
Thanks!

Charlene5 · #5 10-01-2007, 11:09 PM

I ran your picture through Noiseware (a plugin for Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro) and used the strong color noise setting. It does a fairly good job but there's still an awful lot of clean up to do!

MJ

Kraellin · #6 10-01-2007, 11:29 PM

swkmom,

before trying to remove the grain, i'd try to bring the images out more. what you're going to find is that a fair amount of detail is gone in this image. by using noiseware first, you're going to lose even more of that detail. bring the image out first with contrast techniques and then do the noise removal.

you might also try a usm filter (unsharp mask) to help bring things into focus a bit more and this shld also help with the contrasting.

Flora · #7 10-02-2007, 01:31 AM

swkmom,

I agree with Craig ...

Quote:

before trying to remove the grain, i'd try to bring the images out more

Here is my try....

Mostly I used Levels to to bring out the image more.

I used Hue/Saturation and Selective Colors to remove the reddish/yellowish cast.

I used Neat Image (can be downloaded free here) and the Blur Tool to minimize the noise (grain) ... even if more than grain, the problem here seems to be JPG artifacts ....

Gary · #8 10-02-2007, 11:02 AM

Shadow/Highlights, curves, copied the right side of the girls face camera left, flipped horizontal and faded onto her left eye/cheek area, Selective Color and Neat Image. Due to the jpg damage, added a sandstone texture.

zekeode · #9 10-02-2007, 03:08 PM

Done all the same steps as previous posters, but used harder noise filterering on background, and softer on girls. Last step was to add some film grain back.

lurch · #10 10-02-2007, 04:47 PM

Used Adobe Camera Raw to set a white point before opening in CS3. Duplicated the image and took a lot of the noise out in Lab. Back in rgb added the de-noised image as a layer on top of the original background layer, with a layer mask painted to let the original skirt show through. After making color correction curves to set neutrals and skin tones, I used the green channel to do a luminosity blend. Stamped visible onto a new layer and ran the Dust and Scratches filter on that. Sharpened a new merged layer with a hide-all mask painted to reveal only the faces and skirt. Added a new merge layer in Soft Light mode, masked to reveal only the figures.

Sounds really complicated, but it almost took longer to write about than to do. I'd set out to see how good I could make the image look without getting into airbrushing and other artistic reconstruction methods (most of which are beyond my skills

).

swkmom · #11 10-03-2007, 03:00 PM

Thanks everyone. I now have some direction to go in. Thanks for all the input.

Kraellin · #12 10-03-2007, 11:47 PM

i did this yesterday, late. and frankly, i forgot to write down the steps in the layers. tired. what i do recall is a brightness/contrast layer, a tiny bit of clarify, a little sharpening, a jpg artifact removal, some airbrushing and a little blending of some layers.

if all your images are similar to this, you've got some work ahead of you.