Help please - getting rid of horrendous lines

[killerwolf]

Hi all,
just joined the forums. got a few pics of my mother's trip and whilst some are ok, some are absolutely horrific. dunno if the negaatives got damaged in the camera or the processing, but this is an example. i can about fix the brightness but it makes the horizontal lines even worse. any quick(ish) tips? save a lot of masking/blurring etc etc, i'm lost. there's about 12 to do, so i'd prefer not to have to spend 6 hours on each pic!

http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/6991/cnv00035.jpg


Thanks in advance..

[philbach]

Well I had a scanner that did that. It was an old slide scanner. It becomes more obvious in under exposed photos. So my first thought is is to rescan the photo with a different scanner.

[TommyO]

Killerwolf,
Welcome to RetouchPro !
Sorry, no good ideas at the moment. Every channel in every color mode has similar problems. You could still experiment in CMYK or LAB to see what minimizes it the most.

Hopefully someone else will have some advise.

[Steve13]

I have a little Canon lide usb scanner I carry with my laptop that was scanning prints like that. I ran the calibration tool that came with the software and it straightened out. Don't know if that's the problem here though.

[Frank Lopes]

Another idea to test if it is the scanner or not: scan the image twice rotating the photo 90 degrees during the second scan.

Then compare if the lines show in the same direction or if they changed direction.

[learninlady]

I tried but wound up loosing too much of the image.

[byRo]

Save yourself a lot of trouble and just get a new scanner.
I've seen this before, it won't get better and soon it will stop working for good.

Rô

[killerwolf]

cheers all and thanks for the welcome.

sadly, it's not my scanner, or pics - my mother got them done at a shop in town. haven't seen the negatives themselves but i strongly suspect they're damaged rather than the scan procedure itself. i'll ask next time i see her tho.

cheers
KW

[vidyakk9]

I had tried but tired........ at last gave up!!!

[Southbay]

Originally Posted by killerwolf

...sadly, it's not my scanner, or pics - my mother got them done at a shop in town. haven't seen the negatives themselves...

Don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking at here. Is this then a scan of a print?

If so, I agree there's little that can be done to fix this. The more I kick it up, the worse it looks. Color channels are doing nada for me.

I suppose the only hope lies in the negs. Perhaps they're OK, and there was a problem in the printing end of things.

[philbach]

What it looks like to me is a scan of a transparency like color negative film or a 35 mm slide. At least thats what these artifacts looked like on my lousy, old, ready to die scanner. Thats why Ro and I recommended a rescan with a better scanner.

[killerwolf]

i'm assuming it's the shop's scan of the negative. the pic is from a photodisc they supply (hi res = 72dpi according to them ?!) so i assume their procedure is to develop and scan the negs.

[DXM]

Umm I think I know what that is...
I had this happen to me a couple of times back in the olden days when I shot with an analog SLR. What that looks like to me is a picture shot at the wrong ISO (possibly the wrong settings for the kind of film used) and then run through the print shop's preset automatic restoration process. They try to automatically fix images that it perceives as too dark, this can can leave you pictures "rapit regit rectam" (royally butt-f*cked). I think the only way to actually save those images unless the negative is damaged is to go to an old school photography shop and ask to have the images manually developed and then scan them.

Before doing this though, try to check out the negatives yourself, place the negatives on a white piece of paper and place against a backlit piece och glass and then check them with a magnifying glass. considering how dark they are quite a lot of the negative ought to be very light and with a magnifying glass you ought to see tiny specks or grains consistent with the linear noise the image shows.

I also call for others with analog experience to correct me if I'm wrong.

[Kraellin]

this is somewhat salvagable... somewhat. the image was originally shot in low light, which is why it's so grainy and somewhat accounts for the streaks, if it was a film camera... maybe.

regardless, it can be helped. the real question is, how much time are you willing to put in on it. i've done some work on it and improved it, but i'm not even going to try to finish... too much work

what i did was some contrasting and the FFT RGB. that might seem an odd start, especially the fft, but it can help remove streaks, sometimes... if you're lucky

the FFT did help a bit but not enough to remove all the streaks, so i made a blank layer above the rest and used airbrush, clone, push and eraser to do some more work on the body. i highlighted the browns with airbrush and the blacks, while cloning out some of the streaks. push was used very sparingly just to smudge a little here and there. eraser was used at a very low opacity (3%) to erase where i overdid things.

like i said, i'm not going to finish this one, but this shld give you some ideas on what can be done if you really want to.

[killerwolf]

thanks for the info DXM - i thought much of the grain was due to low light too, but the rest i assumed was damage.

Kraellin, many thanks for the tip - i didn't know anything about that filter but i've hunted it and a couple of tutes out and will give it a shot.

just to clear up any misunderstanding, i wasn't asking anyone to do the work for me (in case y'all think i'm a freeloader :-D ) ~ i want to do it myself to get practice.
here's my current WIP, and yeah, it's gonna be a lot of time...
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/8052/tigerwip.jpg

so far i've copied the tiger to her own layer, popped the colours a bit using levels, adjustment layers and the like, and down a load of cloning etc to deaden the lines. i made a copy, blurred it w/ median and overlaid that which helped a bit too. for much of the background i decided a simple airbrushing will do as when i blasted the brightness up there was no detail there anyway. the bit directly behind the tiger i'll mess about w/ more and might blur it a little since it's not the subject of the pic anyways.

still a load of blending and colour work to do, and tidying up/masking of the tiger to blend her back in (obviously she's just a fast cut-out from the lasso tool at the mo) - i'll probably just blend the feet off into shadow a bit.

how's this looking? i work w/ my screen slightly dark compared to the standard windows gammas etc so it might be overly bright..?

thanks for all the comments everyone.

[DXM]

@Killer...// Naah, you're only a freeloader until you've helped someone else ^_^

although I believe "the of kids today" call it leeching... either way I'm happy if the info helped, I was wondering there for a while whether or not that was an analog or digital image but seeing as I remembered getting pics back looking like that I drew the conclusion that it was an analog and posted my experience on the subject.

Good luck and keep us updated on the progress.

[bradfordphoto]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...tiger_done.jpg


The quality of the image is really low, I spent 10 mins on it bluring and adding noise, I don't know if it is better or not..

[spydercam]

I think using the blur like you did bradford and some of the other techniques would do it decently well.

[killerwolf]

hey all,
thanks for the replies, and for the help/attempts. i've been working away on a couple of these in between a ton of other stuff, and i've gotten to the "give up" point now :-D
simply, the source material is too bad to do anything w/ - either stuff end up too exagerrated, or trying to fix one aspect just ends up emphasising another

http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/2072/35after.jpg - the first pic. i tried to blend out as much as i could and boost the colours, and ended up just painting in shadows since a lot of the lower detail was gone anyways. i think it looks too "worked on".

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/2783/31081177.jpg ~ before
http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/1926/36after.jpg ~ after
a little better, tried bits and pieces of blurring, cloning, FFT etc etc etc

http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/3272/64747864.jpg ~ before
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/7885/31after.jpg ~ after
managed to get a load of the noise off this, but again, it's too dark, and attempting to lighten it by any great degree just brings out more rubbish to try and fix.

http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/3050/26239629.jpg ~ before
http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/7339/29after.jpg ~ after
wasn't a whole Hell of a lot i could do w/ this, ended up just cropping most of the rubbish and manage to pull down a bit of the tint, and lighter the fur a little.

thanks again all, but i think this project was doomed from the start :-D
if nothing else, at least it's given me a little more experience and ideas though.

[Chain]

Yeah, the images are somewhat doomed - those lines are there for good unless you manually repaint the whole thing... You should go back to the negatives (check if they are alright) and re-scan them youself.

...and if the negatives are like this as well... then you are truly doomed =

[Cupcake]

I made the picture a B&W and then backed off some.
Noise remover in CS3 ,redid the eyes.
The lines are not green any more; but you can still see the light color
lines.
I would tell the shop to redo the pictures!