Help with retouching a very old photo

My mom asked me to work some “Photoshop voodoo” into a picture for her. I’m still searching for the “voodoo” button in my copy of elements, but until I find it, I need help! I did some healing, cloning, a black and white convert, and noise reduction, but this picture hasn’t gotten a whole lot of love in 45 years, and this is my fist time trying any restoration work, so any suggestions or edits would be much appreciated!

Here is the Original:

As you have figured out, the newspaper print is with a 65 line screen so a whole lot of info/quality is missing.

Kodak has a series of software plugins available that can be very helpful in working over old photos. Try googling Kodak Pro.....

i tried to use the smudge tools and this is the what i am getting -

rudy

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I would take the glass off a couple of picture frames (non glare preferably) and place the newspaper picture sandwiched between them. This will help flattening the creases, and then scan it or take a photo of it with proper lighting to avoid any flares on the glass. Probably then you may have a better picture to restore. You will have to deal with the issue Jon mentioned.

Jon- i couldnt find any of those plugins... you wouldnt happen to know what they are called?

dadikongbaduy- i thought about doing that, but my mom didn't like how the finished image ended up looking like a painting.

Mike- i'm going to try that ASAP... good idea

Bigbitt - If you can post a better original, flattened under glass, etc. per Mike_D, you might be able to use a couple of different techniques. Here is an example where a regular pattern (a screen pattern) was removed with a filtering technique called Fast Fourier Transform filtering, and then that image is manipulated to final. I used Neat Image to remove the noise after FFT treatment, but I am sure there are many other ways. If you use basic blurring techniques, or noise removal techniques, on the entire image to remove the regular screen pattern, you will essentially be losing all of the detail at the screen resolution (sort of what Jon is referring to). With FFT, you can target the frequency of the regular pattern, remove that component of the image, and retain more detail for sharpening, etc.

If the screen frequency is 65 LPI, you want to scan the original at least twice that frequency to avoid aliasing the screen data.

Post a better original and I'll give it a shot. Here are a couple of links to my smugmug page with some FFT examples:

http://kirkt.smugmug.c​om …1871_49ury#4478​2280_FMroZ

http://kirkt.smugmug.c​om …8997_fbkQ7#4570​0479_EV8Rz

Kirk

^^ WOW. Impressive technique. I wouldn't have thought it was possible to recover a newsprint linescreen that well.

Kirk, thanks for the info about FFT.

You're welcome. If you would like to play around with FFT and other image processing tools, I would suggest the free ImageJ. ImageJ is the Java version of the once-Mac-only NIH Image. It can be found here:

http://rsbweb.nih.gov/​ij/

And has excellent documentation. It is geared toward scientific image processing, but if you can wade through the jargon, you may find some helpful tools to put in your kit.

Would anyone be interested in a tutorial on FFT processing if I can manage to get this image to work? Thanks for the interest and thanks to Bigbitt for posting an interesting case study.

Kirk

A tutorial would be great. I can't make heads or tails of the documentation. I would be especially interested in a tut that covers noise removal from night star field images. I have a few that are great shots but when I make them bright enough, there is a lot of BG low freq noise.

kirkt wrote in post #5795811
Would anyone be interested in a tutorial on FFT processing if I can manage to get this image to work?

Yes!

A tutorial would be fantastic!

Okie dokie. I can use the image I posted previously (the portrait of the woman) as an example too.

Kirk

+1 for a tutorial Kirk, that's great work!

A tutorial would be great!!