Removing a consistent paper grain.

[Teral]

I'm restoring / cleaning up an old photo for a book cover and am having issues. The original negative isn't available, so I had to scan a 5x7 at high res. When the scanner hits the shot with light it brings out the grain in the paper, and its quite prominent.

Its a consistent pattern, so I was curious if there was a method to remove the pattern from the image.

Here is an example of the texture I'm referring to.

http://img129.imageshack.us/img129/7348/grainll8.jpg

[printmeister]

Try the FFT filter.. you can download from here:
http://www.3d4x.de/index.php?xml=Swi...+Alex+Chirokov

Byro's FFT Tutorial is here:
http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=185

I ran it on your pic.. you will need to do a bit more work at the edges etc. but you will get a result.

Actually, there is a tip at the end of Byro's tutorial on how to get rid of the edge problems.

[Teral]

Is this a windows plug-in? Can't seem to install it on a Mac.

[lurch]

ImageJ is a stand-alone program that runs on a Mac. The FFT plugin doesn't.

[Teral]

How might I go about using ImageJ to pull this grain out? Not really finding it particularly easy to navigate.

[lurch]

Not really finding it particularly easy to navigate.

That's an understatement and a half! You'll find FFT under Process>FFT. Just like in the FFT plugin you run FFT and then black out the stars. Run Inverse FFT to get back to the image, hopefully now cleaned up.

[Teral]

Keeps giving me an out of memory errors. Only a 100MB Tiff file with 1.2GB of memory available...

[Teral]

Knocked the size of the image back and setup the memory to 1.65GB, that seemed to do it. However, after I run FFT and then inverse I get nothing.

[lurch]

after I run FFT and then inverse I get nothing.

I've had that experience with honeycomb paper patterns. Had better results using the bandpass filter, but that requires some trial and error. Roughly, you want the high frequency to be about the same size in pixels as the pattern and the low frequency to be (in pixels) much bigger than any feature in the photo.

[0lBaldy]

A couple nudges helped a bit also

(Ctrl+J) background copy
(Ctrl+J) background copy
uncheck background eyeball
Change mode of top layer to Darken
V (select Move Tool)
Up Arrow twice (Nudge up two Pixels)
Shft+Ctrl+N (New Layer)
Shft+Ctrl+Alt+E (Copy all to new layer)
(Ctrl+J) Layer copy
Change mode of top layer to Darken
V (select Move Tool)
Left Arrow twice (Nudge Left two Pixels)
Shft+Ctrl+N (New Layer)
Shft+Ctrl+Alt+E (Copy all to new layer)
Polaroid Dust and Scratch filter (select Light Dust Box)
Levels