Lines on old photo's/pictures

[Hannah 121]

Hi!

Can someone help me with this? Some old photo's or pictures when scanned show lines when printed off. Is there someway to erase/reduce these?

Thanks!

Hannah

[mistermonday]

Hi Hannah, and welcome to RP. If the lines you are referring to are texture of the photo paper used, then you can reduce / remove those lines with a noise filter if they are not too prominent. You can also use a FFT program like image analyzer to filter them out if they appear as a regular repeating pattern across the photo. There are other techniques that involve multiple scans at different angles, use of median filter and other tools in PS. It would help if you could attach a representative image or a section of an image so that members can look at the problem and provide the best recommendations.
Regards, Murray

[zakum]

Can you see the lines when scanned or only when printed?
If only when printed your print heads might need aligning and cleaning.
Hope this helps :-)

[TommyO]

I would agree with Zakum. I have only seen lines from either the print heads or from dirt on the scanner mechanism. They will be hard to remove if embedded in the image. If your scanner is at fault, and you can't fix it right away, you can photograph the images with a digital camera instead. I've posted information about that before, so you could just do a quick search for those threads.