Improve Scan from poor Quality paper

[dnb22]

Hi Guys

I've lost lots of photos and have not been able to to recover any negatives for them, i have managed to to find some that had been printed onto poor quality Paper.

The problem is the Image is such low resolution and the Paper used is very dotty.

I have tried using blow up 3 and then printing the image 6x4 but the quality still looks poor.

I anyone could advise on how to :

1. Recover the dotty paper effect and the dots to replace with real colour.
2. Blow Up the image
3 Increase sharpness of feature
4 Generally make the image better quality.

I'm a complete noob but desperate to try and salvage something back from my lost photos!

Any plugins that will help me along the way?. The only plugin i have used so far is blow up 3



If you click on the image for full resolution you will see just how bad the dotty effect is.

 

[chitkaran]

Can you post the orignal scans ? ... It is hard to suggest anythign before takling a look at the original quality of the scanned image.

 

[dnb22]

Hi Chitkaran,



I have had to block out faces, but that's the best quality i have .

 

[chitkaran]

I am assuming that you already have photoshop...

Filters that can help is Sharpen -> Smart Sharpen

As you mentioned you have a lot of images like these, I would rather advise to dessaturate (Black/White) the image and them adjust the brightness/contrast for the ones which have lost the image quality to a very greater extent- followed by Sepia tone.

Hope it helps .. Cheers !!!

 

[Tom Mann]

The "dotty" pattern that you see is intrinsic to mass produced and some other types of printing (eg, newspapers, magazines, photos in many books, even inkjet prints (to a lesser degree)). It's called half tone reproduction ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone ). It can be a major PITA to remove, but, if a given image is printed this way, you must start the clean-up process by removing this pattern.

Unfortunately, I haven't written about it yet on this forum, but I can post links to posts on another forum where I have addressed similar questions (...I hope this doesn't violate the policy of this forum ...). Scroll down to posts by me in these other threads. These postings (and the above wikipedia link) may help you get started:

http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00ZrZ5
http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00ZkUz
http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00aCx2
http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00YgrJ

In addition to the post-production software approaches I discuss (ie, Fourier tranform and other specialized de-screening and NR software), many scanners have a built-in "de-screening" mode.

HTH,

Tom M

PS - You *ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT* follow chitkaran's suggestion. Intentionally ignoring the half-tone structure of the image and sharpening these dots (with any method including "smart sharpen") will create such a mess, it will make it much more difficult, not easier to address the other issues you mentioned.