Restoring from Scans

Hey Folks,

Just looking for a little advice on a couple photos that I am restoring to be printed on coffee mugs for Christmas. I'm doing this for my fiancée's grandmother.

One quick question is when do you guys do spot healing in your workflow? After scanning, I usually use the Camera Raw Filter to make some broad adjustments to the image. I'm curious if I should spot heal before or after that step.

Also, here's the first image I've already done some work on - including the CR filter, spot healing to get rid of lots of scratches, etc, and a minor amount of sharpening (mostly just some standard output sharpening after resizing for this forum).

Any advice on further corrections to this image is appreciated.

Just for reference, here's the uneditted scan:

Let me add the second photo, which I'm currently spot healing. One big problem with this photo is the lack of sharpeness in the faces. One of the lady's passed away this year, so it's a sentimental thing and Gran's not too concerned with it, she just wants this photo on a mug. So it's what I have to work with. Any tips on how to enhance the sharpness there? I get that there is no bringing detail into an image that isn't there to begin with, but just trying to do the best with the source material. This is the uneditted scan, not including any work I've done so far.

I think you've done a good job with the first image. I recently was asked to scan an old 800 ISO 35mm negative, and found it challenging to try to get adequate contrast and noise reduction with all the apparent grain. I sided with getting good contrast that still showed some grain (800 ISO film was considered fairly grainy anyway). With your second image, I'm afraid you don't have much to work with. It's not just that it's out of focus, but the contrast is limited and the ladies faces are in shadow (so I'm not sure how much you can bring out contrast unless you're scanning from a negative). What software are you using? Myself, for individual photos I fine tune, I use Photoshop. I'd first be trying to see about painting in brightness with blend modes and seeing about sharpening with smart sharpen (maybe even exaggerating and masking in areas).

davesrose wrote in post #18766492
I think you've done a good job with the first image. I recently was asked to scan an old 800 ISO 35mm negative, and found it challenging to try to get adequate contrast and noise reduction with all the apparent grain. I sided with getting good contrast that still showed some grain (800 ISO film was considered fairly grainy anyway). With your second image, I'm afraid you don't have much to work with. It's not just that it's out of focus, but the contrast is limited and the ladies faces are in shadow (so I'm not sure how much you can bring out contrast unless you're scanning from a negative). What software are you using? Myself, for individual photos I fine tune, I use Photoshop. I'd first be trying to see about painting in brightness with blend modes and seeing about sharpening with smart sharpen (maybe even exaggerating and masking in areas).

Yeah, what I'm thinking about with the faces being in shadow is some selective dodging with a paint brush on their faces to lighten them relative to the rest of the image (obviously using a layer so I can fine tune with opacity, and revisit the amount of dodging & burning I do).

I'm using Photoshop CC for this work - both for the import off my flatbed scanner, and the post-processing. I usually use USM for my sharpening purposes. I was able to bring a little extra definition to the faces via local contrast enhancement using the USM set to 10/50/0.

Thanks for the feedback & tips. I managed to get all those ridiculous scratches to disappear... but still have work to do to make the somewhat presentable. Again, it doens't have to be perfect, it's for nostalgia for these ladies, as in each of the images one of the ladies passed away this year. That said, I want to do the best that I can with the source material, both for my own pride and growth as a photographer & editor, and also for the finished product given to loved ones.

Here's the edit where I've removed the scratches from photo 2 (still a bit noisy, but not nearly finished editing this image):

Your first photo strikes me as 'too green'. I used the eyedropper tool of Paintshop Pro to sample the white blouse of the lady standing next to the gentleman to obtain this so you can see what I mean about greenish tint of your version...personally I would use a somewhat warmer White Balance (about 400K to 600K warmer) rather than the neutral (actually somewhat cool) not-green version that I present here:

Wilt wrote in post #18766522
Your first photo strikes me as 'too green'. I used the eyedropper tool of Paintshop Pro to sample the white blouse of the lady standing next to the gentleman to obtain this so you can see what I mean about greenish tint of your version...personally I would use a somewhat warmer White Balance (about 400K to 600K warmer) rather than the neutral (actually somewhat cool) not-green version that I present here:

Thanks, yeah that's much better. I hadn't done my color correction pass aside from an auto temp in the CR filter. Depending on how the image is going to be finally displayed, I load a profile then adjust the final colors. Good eye & adjustment, and I appreciate the feedback.

In the end we actually didn't use this image, as I had a better photo of these 4 people that I had taken at great gran's 95th birthday that I had already fully edited. So we grabbed that photo and I applied the final export settings for the printing and uploaded it.