Old Photo - not having great success

[Schweizer]

Hi,

First post. I've been improving my skills on restoring old photos using PSPPX2, but I routinely come across ones that end up with a blue tint in them from scanning plus have what apprears to be a pesky embedded dust layer.

I've done most of the usual things to separate to B/W, clarify, levels, curves, yada yada, but the blue tint and dust issues have yet to be suitably resolved short of airbrushing. There is a bit of finger oil that is causing the scanner to blue-tint the image btw - I can see it when I look at it against a light source.

I also tried the 2-image 180-degree scan differencing trick explained in one of the tuts here that worked to some degree but not completely satisfactorly.

I don't need the image back but thought some here might have some different approaches to solve these 2 problems at a minimum, and explain what they did.


Thanks!
pic: http://i42.tinypic.com/2e2dowy.jpg

[amica999]

Welcome to RetouchPro, Schweizer. I ran this plugin on the pic to remove the blue tint and a little curves, nothing else, though. Hope it helps
http://home.planet.nl/~ber03728/4N6s...ugin/getit.htm hope it helps

[Frisianman]

I tried this:
Black and White (cyans -50, blues -100)
Levels
Reduce Noise with a mask for the faces and some other light parts (strength 3, preserve details 50%, sharpen details 25%)
Gaussian Blur with the same mask (0,8 pixels)
Unsharp Mask (amount 175, radius 1,8, threshold 3)

[TommyO]

Schweizer,
Welcome to RetouchPro !
That is a very interesting image. It looks like they were performing a skit - great shot.

I do see what looks like a lot of silvering in the image. I don't see the blue tint, at least nothing too damaging. There are numerous methods to deal with silvering. Unfortunately, it is never removed 100% in Photoshop or PSP. But, it can be reduced substantially. There is another means outside of PS or PSP, depending on how important the original is. In this case it may not be something you would want to attempt yet. But, for less critical images or for images that need archival immediately, you can reduce the silvering by applying less reflective & relatively inert substances to the surface of the image. My favorite is Vasoline applied with a Q-tip. Other acceptable products are waxes, generally a paste wax. The less color in the wax the better. This is usually done knowing that the silvering will eventually destroy the entire image and the scan is necessary for long term archival.

Regarding the dust, if it is not from the internals of your scanner, then it could be from scanning at too high a resolution. Resolutions of 300-600 dpi are generally quite acceptable and can be upsampled with good results in PS or PSP. Higher than that generally results in unacceptable levels of dust which must then be removed in software.

[unimatrix001]

Welcome to RetouchPro:
I switched to cmyk mode selected the cyan channel copied and pasted to new layer. I then selected the left side of the photo attachment 2 created 2 new layers blending mode soft light. On the first layer I used the gradient tool (foreground to transparent) black as the foreground color, from left to right to darken the selected area. On the second layer using gradient tool (same settings) from right to left to darken that side of the selection. Then ran noiseware pro to reduce noise. Hope this gives you some help in your work. I did no other corrections to the photo. this took about 15 minutes to get the selection somewhat correct.

[Schweizer]

Wow. Awesome results. I love the various methods used. Very interesting. That said, I made a comparison chip to use for evaluation. What is interesting is that the original still has the best detail, so I need to somehow not lose that (mask). The silvering was greatly improved, with the plug-in doing the cleanest job of it but there is still a hint of it but the results were less distorted than the others. The "dusty" issue was cleaned up by all three, and the gradient method smoothed out the floodlighting. The noiseware pro did a good job on the noise but some face detail was also lost. Not a perfect world!

Any other observations? Thanks everyone for their efforts!

[Schweizer]

OK, here is what I ended up doing. Looking at the various results above I decided to see how well I could do without throwing any pixel algorithms at the thing (noise increase/decrease) as all of them seemed to negatively impact the details, especially in the faces.

The method that worked best was to take the cmyk version, duplicate-multiply, which by itself wiped-out the silvering problem (yea!), then I simply added 3 adjustment layers - brightness/contrast, levels, and curves. I'm pretty happy with the results, as it gives me a good starting point to work from to fix the other problems. Notice the original detail was retained. Now comes clean-up.

http://i43.tinypic.com/2z82qv7.jpg

Thanks all!

[MooNy214]

Hello. I tried something. Hope you like it
http://i41.tinypic.com/2llzvyq.jpg

[TommyO]

Schweizer,
I think your last result looks very good. The contrast is excellent with plenty of fine grain left in those areas that had silvering.
Good work !

[Schweizer]

Thanks Tom. Always learning and trying new ideas. This was an interesting exercise.

[philbach]

Well what seemed to help the most was is what others have done.
• convert to CYMK
• Select the Cyan Channel and convert to B&W
• I used Neat Image to further remove the silver stains

[Schweizer]

You did a bit more work on it than that Phil!

Well done!

I don't have "Neat Image" in PSPPX2 but it seems to be a killer tool.

[jannetie]

Silver polish works too - I always scan first, and as you said, the silvering will destroy the image anyway.

Originally Posted by TommyO

Schweizer,
Welcome to RetouchPro !
That is a very interesting image. It looks like they were performing a skit - great shot.

I do see what looks like a lot of silvering in the image. I don't see the blue tint, at least nothing too damaging. There are numerous methods to deal with silvering. Unfortunately, it is never removed 100% in Photoshop or PSP. But, it can be reduced substantially. There is another means outside of PS or PSP, depending on how important the original is. In this case it may not be something you would want to attempt yet. But, for less critical images or for images that need archival immediately, you can reduce the silvering by applying less reflective & relatively inert substances to the surface of the image. My favorite is Vasoline applied with a Q-tip. Other acceptable products are waxes, generally a paste wax. The less color in the wax the better. This is usually done knowing that the silvering will eventually destroy the entire image and the scan is necessary for long term archival.

Regarding the dust, if it is not from the internals of your scanner, then it could be from scanning at too high a resolution. Resolutions of 300-600 dpi are generally quite acceptable and can be upsampled with good results in PS or PSP. Higher than that generally results in unacceptable levels of dust which must then be removed in software.

[PK_KC]

I've given it a bit of an attempt to repair the thumb tack holes in the corners. I didn't spend a great deal of time on it, but you'll get the idea.

Hello, by the way. I'm new - signed up today. I'm not a professional photograph editor, but I've had some practice in CS2/3.

Anyways, if this thread is even active still - here's the results. I edited the pre-silver removal photo.

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f3...econstruct.jpg


ps: I didn't see that Phil had already done the corners, well done there.

[roger_ele]

To remove silvering copy the photo with a digital camera (ideally with a polarizing filter on the camera - and even better also on the lights - but even with no pol. filters it will be better than the scan) - if you are not set up with the digital camera to get the detail in the copy, merge the digital camera image with the scanned photo and just mask out the silvering since the shadows won't be as critical for detail

[Schweizer]

Thanks all. I don't have a camera set-up, and although this one photo turned out OK, I still feel there must be a way to create a mask pulled from a split channel that can be used to "null out" or replace the silvered pixels with pixels from neighbors but I am just a hack and not sure where to start.

I really want to preserve the character of the original scan and by splitting the channel and using the cyan CMYK as a new starting point, seems to throw away much of the original chacater. I've run into this with subsequent photos and using the methods above, or spending a hour cloning, is making me grumpy.

Anyone have any bright ideas on using a split channel as a mask or as an adjustment layer in some way to deal with silvering?

[roger_ele]

Really - Yes, you need a camera for this - any camera with a lens that will focus close enough (even point and shoot) but, you don't need a 'camera set up' Move a table against a wall next to a window, lean the photo slightly against the wall, set your camera on a book so the lens is about at the height of the center of the photo. Position the photo / camera far enough down the wall that the window light is not reflecting off the silvering. Use the book the camera is sitting on as your tripod. No fancy lenses needed, just something that will focus close.

With out a real 'camera set up' you will also want to scan the image, pull the camera image in to the top layer of your scanned image, use free transform to match the camera image to the scanned image. Probably change the camera image layer to darken blend mode and mask to taste

[dmrdm]

Just wanted to mention, if you will be doing a lot of restoration on old photos, Katrine Eismann has a wonderful book called PS Restoration and Retouching. At the time I bought the Second Edition, I used PSP but just got it to see how it's all done. It's a great book. I only wish she would publish more books! (she has video's on Lynda.com also and you'll hear her name from time to time from Scott Kelby and others also. I think when I got CS3, some videos' came with the program also and she had a few on that CD also. She's a great teacher.)

[Schweizer]

Thanks. I'll look for the book.