I have an old picture of my fiancee's mother and father. The original was only about 1.5 x 1.5 inches and I scanned it at 1200 (or was it 2400) dpi to be able to blow it up a little for them.

The pictures is in very rough condition and with my limited graphic experience and Paint Shop Pro 7 I was unable to do much of anything worthwhile with the picture.

I have the picture uploaded here

Anybody out there able to spend a couple minutes if they know what to do or even sharing some information on how I might clean it up myself??

Thanks!

Rene

Here's the best I could do in five minutes. I did a basic 'levels' cleanup to get the colors looking nice, then I blurred the daylights out of it, particularly the red channel, then I did what I could to sharpen up what was left.



Full-res link:
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/photo/gertandmarsh.jpg

(although, there isn't any extra information in the higher-res version...)

Thanks! I think they'll be more then pleased!

I'll be sure to let them know of the wonders of the empegbbs!

Rene

Here's a a less destructive attempt. I gave up on getting entirely rid of the ripple in the background, but instead just tried to nuke the red dots.


(full version) http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/photo/gertandmarsh2.jpg

I'm sure cybjorg could push it even farther. If you wanted to get more serious, you'd try to find a tool that would let you transform the image to frequency space, where all of this texture would yield noise within a fairly narrow spectrum band where it would then be much easier to remove. I actually found an FFT plugin for Photoshop, but the resulting images from a small amount of dorking around are, well, not exactly what you're looking for. There are commercial "texture removal" tools that would probably do a better job, if you really, really wanted to solve the problem...

I took your top image and used the magic wand and used 'Smart-blur' in patches to even out some of the pattern, leaving the areas around the faces alone. This was a quickie, but it got rid of most of the pattern in the sky where it's most noticable.

-Zeke

Okay, one last attempt because I really wanted to make that FFT thing work. Here's the 3rd attempt. This time, I draw big horizontal and vertical lines through the FFT in an attempt to nuke the pattern. Then I used the clone tool to clean up the sky. Not perfect, but...



(full version) http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/photo/gertandmarsh3.jpg

The ripple/moire pattern is because the source resolution and the scanning resolution interfer in wave patterns. If you rescan the photo in a slightly different resolution (not a power-of-two multiplier/divisor) you should get a better scan for aditional processing.

--Nathan

My guess is that the original picture was under some kind of textured plastic or otherwise stored in a not terribly pristine environment that imbued it with that particular texture. Given that the original was 1.5 inches wide, the scan has plenty of resolution. A little extra Photoshop elbow grease could clean it up, to some extent, but I don't see this thing improving terribly much.

Yeah, that's definitely _not_ a moire pattern due to scanning. Glue dots in a self-adhesive photo album is my guess. What makes them hard to cope with is that they are exactly the same scale as the details in about the faces of the subjects. That makes them harder to deal with since the blur radius then eats the face details, and unsharp mask won't bring those back. Usually a moire is at a higher frequency than the photo details, so a small radius blur and then an unsharp mask usually work pretty well if a re-scan's not possible.

So long as the face areas stay 'sharp' (as possible they're none to sharp to start with) the eye is pretty forgiving about blurring in the remainder of the photo. There's no magic bullet for this one.

-Zeke

Thanks for your help guys!

The in-laws loved it and I gave all the credit to the empeg BBS.

Thanks again!

Rene

I've always been in awe of people that are good with Photoshop!

Does anyone have any free plug-ins they recommend? Most can work with Irfanview..

I came across this one called AutoInterlacer. EDIT: Latest version of Irfanview doesn't seem to support it.

Although it's somewhat specialized, I've been very happy with PTLens. If I'm using the wide-angle end of my zoom lens, particularly indoors, the barrel distortion can be distracting. The completely solves the problem. It's even smart enough to read the EXIF headers and figure out the lens settings automatically.