Fixing a bad scan from an old pic

[lumnalight]

I have been fooling around with a pic that had a really bad scan so I have red, gren, and blue texture on the surface. It is an old picture of a groop, full body shot, from the seventies that I am restoring to look better. To top every thing off it is a little underexposed, so I have changed my levels and changed contrast and saturated it. I can't blur it with Gaussian blur because the faces are so small and I have tried bluring the individual faces with the blur tool but I am still getting discoloration from those red, green and blue pixels from the scan. Any body have any clue to what to do?

[monk]

without seeing it i can't really help much but goto http://www.retouchpro.com , they have a lot of helpful tips on restoration, i'd suggest using the clone tool or in ps7, the art history brush with a really small brush zoomed up

[Harp2]

Lumnlight,

What about unsharp mask filter? Have you used that on the faces?

To darken the contrast just copy the picture to new layer. Try using muliply, overlay, and screen settings in layers to boost the contrast up more relistically. You might want to make 3 layers and look at the results of each setting separately. Adjustment layers work well with this also.

Toy around and have fun with it. Many times I've found this is a good personal skills development exercise.

Or you could just post the photo and have other people give it a shot.

Harp!

[lumnalight]

I have been looking at retouchpro.com didn't find what I was looking for. I have posted the pic http://www.pressenter.com/~kim/dartteam.jpg Here is the origional.
http://www.pressenter.com/~kim/dartteam-fix.jpg

[SeventhVirgo]

I think you should just adjust the contrast and/or brigtness now.
I'ts kind of dark.

[Koobi]

hmmm after looking at the picture.....did you scan it @ a high resolution?
Id suggest around 600dpi for this one

also, maybe you could do this:

open up the curves dialog box, youll see the colour pickers on the bottom left, choose the black one and click on the darkest spot on the image, DO NOT CLICK ON ANY SHADOWS,

and then choose the white one and click on the brightest spot on the pic, DO NOT CLICK ON ANY REFLECTIONS

now choose the grey picker and click on a place on the image where the colour is neutral

thats just one method, the best thing would be to correct the colours by numbers but thats hard to type out here :S

PS: It may not work in all cases...i typed that out from personal experience not from a tute or something so i dunno if this will work in all cases
good luck though man

[coloredbean]

Like Bane said, a better scan is always helpful, but I'm assuming you wouldn't be asking if that were an option. Darned relatives and clients think we're magic ... ;o) There's no way to turn this image to proverbial gold, but you can bring it quite a long way from where it is. Here's my take:
(just numbering to help separate steps ...)

1. You can get rid of the colored dot patterns by blurring the image using Gaussian Blur (I used about 3.6 or so), and then Edt > Fade Gaussian Blur, and change the blending mode to Color. You've still got what looks like paper grain, but at least it's not (as badly) multi-colored.

2. Then I duplicated the layer and ran dust and scratches on the duplicate (I used radius 4, threshhold 5, but just get rid of the textured pattern and don't worry about the detail in the image.)

3. Now add a mask to your duplicate layer hiding the entire thing (black mask), and then paint the mask back in white in the areas you want to get rid of the texture. I don't like the history brush, and this gives you a lot more flexibility. It's tedious, and not absolutely perfect, but it's a good place to start.

4. I like to fix the contrast using histogram to find the darkest and lightest pixels in the image, fixing it with a levels adjustment layer (around 58 for the shadows, 1.4 for the gamma, and leave the highlight alone), and then set the adjustment layer to Luminosity.

5. Then stick a target on something that's supposed to be white (that's not blown out) such as the left guy's shirt, and something that's supposed to be black, and use a Color Balance adj. layer to fix it while keeping an eye on your values in the Info palette.

6. Looking back, some of those values might be a bit coarse, so as with any advice please just consider them as a starting point. There will still be a lot of fine-tuning to do (some spot dodging or multiple levels adjustments with masks, maybe a bit of refining things by hand in their faces), but again, it's a good start. Hope that helps even a little. Take care and good luck!

[Koobi]

excellent directions colored :)

BTW i forgot to include the part about reducing those multi coloured dots

i would have said use a guassian blur and after that use the unsharp mask filter but i think coloured's method is better


:edit::edit::edit::edit::edit:

I just remembered that i read somewhere(from something written by Gary David Bouton...one of my fav's) that once you correct the colours in a pic, the image seems sharper so you might want to correct the colours before you apply any sharpening filters....btw bean, i tried your method on a bad scan at work today and it worked like a charm!

heh bean and bane...thats sounds funny

[rYche]

BITCH... thats some excellent advice on fixing scans... good shit bean and bane...

[Harp2]

With Bean and Banes great advice, I nominate this for a sticky.

Harp!

[Koobi]

refer to this:
http://www.graphic-forums.com/showthread.php?postid=29226#post29226