Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   There are a bunch of problems you might face, from fading to rips or tears, but one thing that's a given is that you'll have dust & scratches. [It bothers me to say "dust", because you (should have at least) wiped the photo clean before you copied it, but can't think of a better word for all the dots you'll get.]

   It's common enough that one of the very first [if not the 1st] filters included in image editing software was the Dust & Scratch filter. And it works, but with a sometimes pretty high price -- more a blunt instrument than a scalpel, it can cause loss of detail &/or blurring throughout the photo. Normally you don't even want to think about using the Dust & Scratch filter if it's snowing in the photo. Here's a simple way to deal with that -- think of a Dust & Scratch brush that lets you selectively apply the filter wherever you paint on the original, *with no effect* on the rest of the photo.

   The basic method behind the technique is hardly revolutionary -- it can be [and often is] used with many effects &/or adjustments. So I spent a few minutes with Google looking for any related tips & tricks, tweaks that might help it work better, and surprisingly all I found was advice on using Photoshop's Healing Brush -- its side effects were exactly what I wanted to avoid, at least as much as possible. And that's the main reason why I'm writing & posting this -- there's a better way that folks might never read about otherwise.

   Now this is based on using Photoshop, but the basic idea should work in any image editing software that has layers, e.g. PaintShop Pro. You start with the photo on one layer, duplicate it, & apply the Dust & Scratch filter to the upper layer [the copy], adjusting the filter's settings to get rid of the majority of dust & scratches, not worrying too much about what it's doing to the rest of the photo, e.g. blurring etc.

   Next you add a layer mask to that same layer. In Photoshop that mask is going to be white & thus transparent -- now invert it, so that the mask is black, meaning it's completely blocking that layer, making it invisible, so that you see the picture with all its dust & scratches. Click the layer mask to select it, set the foreground color to white, and select the brush tool, adjusting its settings, e.g. opacity, to whatever works best for you. Now simply paint over the dust & scratches that you want to repair -- what you're really doing is painting on that layer mask, and wherever you paint, turning it from black to white, the upper layer with the Dust & Scratch filter applied is going to show.

   Once you're done you can flatten or merge or create a composite or group out of the 2 layers, duplicate that, and go on restoring the photo if/as necessary.

   Using this method has several advantages over things like the clone brush or tool &/or the healing brush or tool &/or using something like Inpaint when you're only dealing with smaller imperfections -- the biggest plus is that you're avoiding the potential side effects of using those tools, like unintended patterns or color/tone &/or sometimes obvious texture mismatches.

   Posted 6 years ago #
2. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   I saw lots of info on Adobe's Lightroom for years, and never really gave it a thought until I watched a bunch of Photoshop training videos, which often included using Lightroom. Before that I guess I just didn't have any concept of what it can & will do. I don't know how many people are in the same situation, who would use Lightroom if they had a better idea of what it does, so I thought it might be useful to talk about how I'm using it now, restoring these old [by several decades to a century] photos.

   First step was [is] taking digital photos of the old prints -- these were saved in RAW & jpg formats, sometimes with 2 or more shots per photo if it looked like I might not be capturing the full amount of data... in these cases I often take one normal shot, and one shot with the exposure increased to make the whole photo lighter, and get that shadow detail. I open the folder with a group of images in Lightroom's Library, where the RAW files are shown as larger thumbnails. For organization you can flag individual photos, & add keywords if you want, then filter them based on that, creating groups called collections. Then you can bring up a collection to work on, not having to sift through all the images to find the ones you want. You can also save different catalogs, e.g. each one based on a folder of images.

   Clicking the Develop tab those thumbnails run along the bottom, with a central window showing the photo you've selected, & tools along either side. When I've got 2 [or more] shots of the same photo, I'll select both, then have Lightroom merge them into an HDR image that's saved in Adobe's universal RAW format, .dng. I'll select that .dng file, & since many of these old photos don't match the camera's aspect ratio, the original photo's border is visible, & I use that to set the White Balance using the eye dropper tool. While I set the white balance manually for the lighting used, these photos are aged & no longer pure white. Then I'll click the crop button, which brings up a draggable border on each side of the photo -- I drag those into place, click done, & that border's no longer there.

   Next, along the right side tools, under the Basic dropdown, I click the Auto button. That really brings it close, so the tweaking I do in the settings below that is in most cases optional. Many of these old photos where taken with a flash, and some have some fading or broad streaks that may be lighter or darker. In photos where the flash lights the center, but that light falls off in a circular pattern the further you get from that center, I'll add a circular gradient, which is just clicking & dragging really. Then I just drag the exposure slider so everything matches. You can also use linear gradients, but where that won't work, e.g. with those broad streaks that are in some of the photos, I use the brush tool. I click the check box to make my painting visible as a light red tint, paint over the areas I want/need to change, uncheck the box to get rid of the red overlay, then again move the exposure slider so things match. If I get it wrong, on the left side is the History, where everything I've done is listed, line by line -- I just click the line before whatever I've done & start over. There is a spot repair tool, but these old photos are bad enough that using it isn't practical.

   At this point the image is basically done in Lightroom, so I go to the menus & edit it in Photoshop -- you can choose to open it in several different apps instead if you want.

   In Photoshop the 1st thing I''ll often do is correct for perspective error using the warp tool -- many of these old photos are of small children, shot looking down from an adult height, and using a camera with a lower quality, wider angle lens, so anything horizontal leans, sometimes radically, towards the outside of the photo. After getting things straightened I have to crop the photo again, because the sides are no longer straight. Then I'll duplicate that layer, twice, and use the trick I talked about in the 1st post to get rid of most scratches etc. When I'm done with that I'll group the 2 layers, make a copy, merge that copied group into a single image layer, and use the healing brush & patch tools to fix the stuff that was too major for the dust & scratch filtering.

   Next, I'll copy that layer -- it's optional, but dividing what I'm doing into seperate layers gives me some sort of history or timeline to work with if I open this file later. I'll use the levels adjustment on this new layer, which adds an adjustment layer on top of it. Because I've got 2 connected layers again, I'll group them, copy the group, & merge the copy. I set this layer to overlay or soft light in the dropdown menu, add a slight gaussian blur, & drop the opacity to 10-20 -- you can turn this layer's visibility on/off to see the effect & readjust as needed. What it does on these old B&W photos is add the appearance of slightly more depth. Done.

   I'll save-as my work as a Photoshop .psd file in a separate folder -- if I let P/Shop just save it it'll save a .tif file in the folder where all these original images are stored. It will show up in Lightroom, where I give it a quick look to make sure that the white or black levels aren't clipping. Once I've made sure that's good, I'll export the image in Photoshop in .jpg & .png formats.

   The RAW photos I imported into Lightroom remain untouched -- I can open them in whatever app & they're still identical to the 1st time I opened them in Lightroom. I can open this catalog in Lightroom, and everything I've done is still there -- I can still go back in history, or change most any of the settings I've used. When I open one of the saved .psd files in P/Shop I don't have the history like I did before I closed the file, but I do have the individual steps as layers that I can work with, rather than starting from scratch.

   I don't know of course if this sort of workflow appeals to anyone else, or if anyone else is going to be interested in Lightroom. But now hopefully you've a little bit of an idea about how it works.

   Posted 6 years ago #

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