Photo Restoration

pdennell · Post by **pdennell** » 24 Jul 2006 22:35

Can anyone recommend a good photo editing software to use to 'restore' old black & white scanned photos? I have a lot of photographs that are very dark and others are damaged etc. The ones I have tried won't allow me to magnify and work on one section at a time, or are based on colour work and can't deal with black & white.[confused]

ID:1741

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 25 Jul 2006 08:18

I use mostly Photoshop Elements 4, which has excellent tools for restoring photos including the clone brush and healing brush.

One thing to remember is never to reduce to greyscale, but always to scan in colour and only desaturate at the end of repairs. Also make sure you scan ay high density, I use 300dpi as a minimum and 600 or 1200 when working with the 2' photos (contact prints) from the early 1900's

pdennell · Post by **pdennell** » 25 Jul 2006 15:05

Thanks for that Jane, I'll try that. Now I have another question - I have a few photos that are very dark and the details (like faces in one instance) are too dark to see for dating and geographic clues. Does anyone have any tips please?

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 25 Jul 2006 16:14

I normally just adjust the levels to bring out the detail where available.

If you scan in a 'bad' section and upload it I will see what I can do and post it back. Might be a couple of days though as I am about to rebuild my home PC.

There are some good discussions on photo restoration at
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