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Heavily mottled background in old scan


Frodo007

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Greetings to all!

I am new to this forum and in need of advice. I have several old scanned photos which were printed in so-so quality paper.

Though they were well kept, it seems the image has decayed and shows mottling in uniformly dark or light areas.

Is there any way to address this? I've tried despeckle, reduce noise, dust and scratches... to no avail.

I include the original, unretouched scan (the sepia file) and a partially reworked version (the B&W version on which I fiddled with levels, camera raw filter with dehaze) which shows that the mottling is not really altered.

Any ideas will be appreciated!!

01.JPG02.JPG
 
Others may have a better method, but I tried Surface Blur, which worked reasonably well. I used settings of Radius = 17 and Threshold = 14. Then I used the 'Blend If' sliders on the blurred layer to expose some of the highlights in the hair.

mottling.jpg
 
Just to be sure we are talking about the same thing, could you circle some areas that enclose just one or two "mottles". I want to be sure you are not talking about the larger film grains.

Tom M
 
Thanks for the tip! If my memory serves me right, this was shot on Ilford XP1 400, which had very nice grain, so I´m guessing the issue here is so-so quality paper and a long time elapsed since the shot was taken.
 
As is often common, the noise (from whatever source) is more noticeable in the darks/shadows than in other locations.

What I did first was create a luminosity mask on a version of the image using the minimum filter with a radius of 2 pixels and used that as the filter mask on a Smart Object version of the image and used the Camera Raw filter to reduce noise and darken the shadows. The amount of noise reduction to use is just a judgment call depending on if you want any original grain etc.

There are a number of approaches yet the key concept was to reduce noise given priority to the dark/shadow areas in my example. Lots of approaches to take:
01-adj.jpg

Also, I forgot to mention that there is a considerable amount of JEPG compression artifacts in your original and not sure if that is because of compression of the actual original or due to what you uploaded to the forum.
 
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Yes, there may be compression artifacts on the JPG but the original was a TIFF file scanned ad 600dpi and it showed pretty much the same mottling. I made a JPG copy for uploading it faster to the forum.

The treatment you gave to the image does leave some grain, which I rather like (the mottling, however, was like way tooo much of a good thing). In the old film days, depending on the desired effect, grain could be an esthetic choice rather than nuisance.

I'll start fiddling with the specs you suggested right away! Thank you!

Thanx a lot.
 
Not to belabor what I asked in Post #4, but before I enter this discussion, I need to understand exactly the difference you are trying to point out between "mottling" and film grain, particularly, larger grains. Could you please either describe this in text or illustrate it by circling or otherwise highlighting one or two "mottles".

Tom M
 
Tom: Sorry for my delay in answering. I differentiate the mottling from the grain or noise since the former is seen in the form irregularly distributed mottled pattern which may have the appearance of stains in what would otherwise would be uniformly dark or light areas as opposed to the latter, which tends to be uniformly distributed and smaller.

Grain or noise, up to a point, I can live with: depending on the image it might even have aesthetic value; the mottling makes the image look "dirty", so to speak, or decayed.

The image you see in this post is a 100%-150% blowup of a supposedly uniformly dark area of the image in question (or at least of an area which had a smooth gradient of dark tones). Though it is a JPEG, I could not find significant differences between this version and the original 600 DPI TIFF scan.

.000.JPG
 
Hi Frodo007
Here is my interpretation of the mottling.
I was assuming that the high frequency grain noise was different than the lower frequency noise (almost looks as if related to fiber of the paper)
I adjusted the tone to accentuate the noise and then pulled into Adobe ACR and did the before/after image with the high frequency noise removed from the after image on the bottom. Not sure my interpretation is correct yet thought a picture as below might help the discussion.

You can also start to see some JPEG artifacts with these adjustments that I bet are not in your original.

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 7.19.49 AM.png
 
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Thank your the interesting take on this problem. Yes, the original was a high-res TIFF scan with no artifacts. It is also quite likely that this noise is related to the low-qual paper fiber, but also quite likely that this was a commercial print (low qual paper, exhausted chemicals, etc.).
 
Sorry I haven't been able to respond more quickly, but I've been extremely busy for the last few days.

Personally, I don't see anything that I would call mottling in this image. IMHO, the patterns that John (thebestcpu) obtained are close to what one can obtain if one exaggerates middle spatial frequencies on a pure noise test image, if a sharp enough cutoff is used (ie, so that induces ringing).

Here's my quick take on your image. If you are interested, let me know and I'll write up the technique that I used.

Cheers,

Tom M

PS - Be sure to download the full rez version, as the in-line preview generated by the forum software always contains compression artifacts.
 

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Interested in your technique? You bet I am!! This is what I was trying to achieve from the outset.

I tried to upload the original scan but it was huge for my connection speed.

Thanx!!
 
I'm glad you liked the approach that I used. I have another photo shoot that will extend from this afternoon into the night, so I won't be able to devote any significant time to this thread till tomorrow, but here's a quick summary:

1. Repair all the small but intense imperfections first, eg, the small areas of almost pure white and black pixels caused by dust or other problems. Among old-timers, this is called "spotting" the image. In PS, I typically use the spot healing brush in content aware fill mode for this, but I also will use the dust & scratches in darken or lighten mode if there is a lot of white dust spots or black image imperfections.

2. Try to recover as much detail as possible in the overexposed arm. I used the highlights part of the shadows / highlights tool to do this. Use a very small radius (under advanced settings) to get the best effect.

3. Fix the non-uniform dark tone that's lifting (brightening to a mid-gray level) the blacks in the right quarter of the image, and especially, along the very right edge of the image. To do this, I used two levels adjustment layers, one masked with a gradient to affect only the right quarter of the image, and the 2nd masked to affect only a thin strip along extreme RH edge. One wants to achieve a nice consistent level of background brightness throughout the image. This step should not be omitted or done poorly.

4. I made a quick, rough, feathered selection of the subject and saved it. Don't fret over this, a quick selection with the lasso tool will be just fine.

5. I applied Topaz DeNoise to the entire image. As I recall, I used some fairly extreme settings such as pushing the sliders for blacks and black point compensation all the way to the right, and the slider for highlights all the way to the left, and only then slowly bringing up the overall effect level to the point where it was just starting to remove the noise and further darken the background. I then masked the result so that the results of Topaz DeNoise were applied fully to the background, but only slightly to the subject. If I hadn't performed steps #1, #2, and #3 first, this step would have not worked anywhere near as well.

6. I sharpened up the subject slightly by using the anti-shake tool that appeared in PS a couple of years ago. I used the same mask developed in step #4. This step may bring out some more localized image imperfections / sharpening artifacts, but just paint black in the layer mask to get rid of these.

And, that's about it. Hopefully, I'm remembering all the major steps. If I think of any others, I'll add then to this thread.

Oh, BTW, ad hoc methods of reducing noise / grain (eg, based on simple blurring) *never* work as well as dedicated DeNoise algorithms. I own at last a half-dozen different commercial de-noise plugins, and select from between them on the basis of which one is most effective (and has the least unintended side effects, i.e. softening the important parts of the image) in particular cases. IMHO, once this image was prepared correctly, deNoising was not particularly taxing, so almost any of them would have worked well, but I picked Topaz DeNoise because I know that it quickly allows different levels of effect to be applied to the darks vs the lighter areas.

HTH,

Tom M
 
Tom:

Thank you for the info! I'll try this on the original as soon as I can. Just one question more: I use Noise Ninja. Is it as good as the Topaz plugin?
 
Noise Ninja is the one NR plugin that I actually don't have, LOL. It probably would work, but you would have to experiment with its settings to get it to do the same things that Topaz DeNoise did, particularly, the settings to heavily bias the NR towards the darks and correct for changes in black level upon NR. I'm sure you could find work-a rounds, but unfortunately, I couldn't help you with this since I don't have it.

Tom
 

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