Fixing scans of old photos

[gegjr]

Lightroom Version Number

LrC 11.2

Operating System

1. Windows 10

Hi,
I scanned a very old black and white historical photo. The photo itself wasn't particularly good to begin with and whoever (I don't remember) I got it from got little spots on it. I scanned the photo as a tiff and would like to remove all or most of the spots. Does anyone know a way in LrC (or even PS) to remove multiple spots all at one time instead of one by one by one? There are just too many to do them one by one.
Thanks.
Regards

 

[Paul_DS256]

There are just too many to do them one by one

Having you ever heard you have to suffer for your art? ';-)
I understand the problem. I have an old image like that and have a time getting myself motivated to keep working on it.
I happen to come across Old Photo Restoration Software that may be of help. I haven't tried them yet but looking at their examples, it seems to be focused on old photo corrections. They have a 'Download for Free' but I can't see any mention of a trial period.

 

[gegjr]

Thanks, I'll give it a look see.

 

[johnbeardy]

Does anyone know a way in LrC (or even PS) to remove multiple spots all at one time instead of one by one by one?

In LR, no, but I would generally use Photoshop for heavy repairs and have one trick I'd recommend.

It works best on larger areas, for example the sky, and you begin by making a selection on the background layer using the lasso or marquee tool. I then generally feather this selection by 5 pixels or so.

At this point I'll use Ctrl J (Win) or Cmd J on Mac to create a new layer from that selection. So we've got a big patch of sky in its own layer.

The key, assuming we're dealing with dust spots which are light, is to change that sky layer's blending mode to Darken (in Layers palette). This choice of blending mode means that the composite image will prefer pixels from this layer when they are darker than the pixels it finds below them. That definition of Darken blending mode is important to understand.

Switch now to the Move tool (V) and use the keyboard arrow keys to nudge this sky layer a pixel or two up, a pixel or two to the right.

This means that we are moving our layer's good sky pixels over the white dust spot pixels in the layer below. Thinking back to the above definition, Darken blending mode means that the composite image will show this layer's sky layer pixels, in preference to the lighter dust spot pixels below them. Of course, by moving this layer we are also moving its dust spots over good sky areas in the layer below, but Darken also handles this - our sky layer's lighter pixels aren't used because the pixels below are darker.

See if you can follow through the above in Photoshop. I use it with spots, to a lesser extent nowadays with scratches. Small movements are often important. Also, I sometimes reduce my layer's opacity a little, just to hide what I've done.

John

 

[Hal P Anderson]

I can only "like" that once. Pity.

 

[Replytoken]

I can only "like" that once. Pity.

I was going to offer you mine, but I liked it too much as well.

--Ken

 

[gegjr]

In LR, no, but I would generally use Photoshop for heavy repairs and have one trick I'd recommend.

It works best on larger areas, for example the sky, and you begin by making a selection on the background layer using the lasso or marquee tool. I then generally feather this selection by 5 pixels or so.

At this point I'll use Ctrl J (Win) or Cmd J on Mac to create a new layer from that selection. So we've got a big patch of sky in its own layer.

The key, assuming we're dealing with dust spots which are light, is to change that sky layer's blending mode to Darken (in Layers palette). This choice of blending mode means that the composite image will prefer pixels from this layer when they are darker than the pixels it finds below them. That definition of Darken blending mode is important to understand.

Switch now to the Move tool (V) and use the keyboard arrow keys to nudge this sky layer a pixel or two up, a pixel or two to the right.

This means that we are moving our layer's good sky pixels over the white dust spot pixels in the layer below. Thinking back to the above definition, Darken blending mode means that the composite image will show this layer's sky layer pixels, in preference to the lighter dust spot pixels below them. Of course, by moving this layer we are also moving its dust spots over good sky areas in the layer below, but Darken also handles this - our sky layer's lighter pixels aren't used because the pixels below are darker.

See if you can follow through the above in Photoshop. I use it with spots, to a lesser extent nowadays with scratches. Small movements are often important. Also, I sometimes reduce my layer's opacity a little, just to hide what I've done.

John

Thanks, I'll give it a try. However, the spots I'm removing are not sensor dust. They are spots that look like they were put on the print. The specific image is not digital it is film. I do not have the negative or I would simply scan it but I only have the spotted print.

 

[johnbeardy]

Yes, I understood we were talking film and my suggestion assumed that they were spots on the print. While digital sensor dust spots are dark, dust on a negative produces lighter coloured spots on the print.

But if your print's spots are dark (eg from a damaged negative), you can follow the same instructions as above but choose the Lighten blending mode instead.

Glad my comments made sense, Hal & Ken. I once wrote a book just on Photoshop blending modes - it may still be the only book on them! I'd encourage any Photoshop user to play with some of the more important modes like these and just keep them in one's mental toolbox. You never know when they'll come in handy.

 

[Replytoken]

Yes, I understood we were talking film and my suggestion assumed that they were spots on the print. While digital sensor dust spots are dark, dust on a negative produces lighter coloured spots on the print.

But if your print's spots are dark (eg from a damaged negative), you can follow the same instructions as above but choose the Lighten blending mode instead.

Glad my comments made sense, Hal & Ken. I once wrote a book just on Photoshop blending modes - it may still be the only book on them! I'd encourage any Photoshop user to play with some of the more important modes like these and just keep them in one's mental toolbox. You never know when they'll come in handy.

Learning PS is on my bucket list when I have the time, but I greatly appreciate all of the creativity that folks use to get PS to do things I could never imagine.

--Ken

 

[gegjr]

Yes, I understood we were talking film and my suggestion assumed that they were spots on the print. While digital sensor dust spots are dark, dust on a negative produces lighter coloured spots on the print.

But if your print's spots are dark (eg from a damaged negative), you can follow the same instructions as above but choose the Lighten blending mode instead.

Glad my comments made sense, Hal & Ken. I once wrote a book just on Photoshop blending modes - it may still be the only book on them! I'd encourage any Photoshop user to play with some of the more important modes like these and just keep them in one's mental toolbox. You never know when they'll come in handy.

I was wondering if there was a Lighten blending mode. Which you just confirmed.
Since I don't have the negative I don't know if print was from a damaged negative. I have to assume that it is the case. Because I tried using Pec-12 to remove them thinking they were on surface but the Pec-12 did nothing.
On the print the spots look like little reddish dots but when scanned and viewed at 100% or > they look like white circles and some look like light or white rings with dark interiors as though the dot fell and spread like a droplet of water falling into a pool.
Thanks for all great advise.
Regards

 

[johnbeardy]

Learning PS is on my bucket list when I have the time, but I greatly appreciate all of the creativity that folks use to get PS to do things I could never imagine.

--Ken

You know the saying about how to eat an elephant one bite at a time? PS is like a giant toolbox and is too big and amorphous to be absorbed in one go, so don't think of "learning PS" but learn it by doing specific bite-sized tasks in it.

This post is a great example. Fixing a specific problem rewards you with a bunch of related tools and techniques, and with little insights. Here gegjrphotography is faced with spots different to those I'd imagined, and wondered if there might be a Lighten mode. So start looking for those little jobs for PS, and nibble away at it!

 

[gegjr]

You know the saying about how to eat an elephant one bite at a time? PS is like a giant toolbox and is too big and amorphous to be absorbed in one go, so don't think of "learning PS" but learn it by doing specific bite-sized tasks in it.

This post is a great example. Fixing a specific problem rewards you with a bunch of related tools and techniques, and with little insights. Here gegjrphotography is faced with spots different to those I'd imagined, and wondered if there might be a Lighten mode. So start looking for those little jobs for PS, and nibble away at it!

Monster is more like it. Trying to learn PS reminds me of the old days when I went back to university to study desktop publishing when it was in its digital infancy. There were a couple of 'giant' programs, Quark and PageMaker. PageMaker was primarily used by small business internal publishing departments to produce print newsletters (electronic newsletters weren't yet in vogue) by a company named Aldus which was absorbed by Adobe and renamed InDesign. There was also a partner program named Illustrator which I believe, and I could be wrong, was the forerunner to PS.

Note: Aldus PageMaker, later Adobe PageMaker, is a desktop publishing program for Mac and Windows. First released in 1985, PageMaker was the first desktop publishing program for the Macintosh and followed over a year later with the release of 1.0 for the IBM PC. This was a notable application as it was one of the few rare applications which would run under Windows 1.x.​

Anyway, I bring all that up to say PageMaker and Illustrator were Mac only (there was no Apple yet either) programs and they were monster programs with gigantic learning curves!

 

[gegjr]

Follow up question: Is it best to use LrC to open image for editing in PS or is it okay to go directly to PS and open image from PS?

 

[johnbeardy]

I'd suggest opening from LrC, making sure you choose Edit Original. But in your case it doesn't make too much difference.

 

[Conrad Chavez]

…couple of 'giant' programs, Quark and PageMaker. PageMaker was primarily used by small business internal publishing departments to produce print newsletters (electronic newsletters weren't yet in vogue) by a company named Aldus which was absorbed by Adobe and renamed InDesign.
…Anyway, I bring all that up to say PageMaker and Illustrator were Mac only (there was no Apple yet either) programs and they were monster programs with gigantic learning curves!

That’s part of the problem. PageMaker and Illustrator had big learning curves…in 1988, when those applications are much simpler than what we have to learn now!

Just to clarify how all that software fits together historically:

Adobe Illustrator and Aldus FreeHand were both vector drawing applications released in 1988 (Illustrator first), and they battled it out into the 1990s. They were both basically graphical user interfaces for the Adobe PostScript page description language that drove the Apple LaserWriter printer. Their primary drawing method was the Pen tool based on Bézier curves, and that contributed to the high learning curve, because the way the Pen tool works is not intuitive to anyone trained in traditional drawing. But the Pen tool succeeded because it’s extremely precise. FreeHand was discontinued after being acquired by Macromedia and then Adobe; neither company maintained it well. So Illustrator is the survivor, and the current version can do so much more than in 1988 that its learning curve is higher than ever.

Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress were both page layout software, also locked in battle through the 1990s. After Adobe bought Aldus, PageMaker was not renamed InDesign. InDesign was a separate and new code base, started at Aldus, to create a new layout application from the ground up, free of the serious limitations in PageMaker. Some say that the InDesign project was a big reason Adobe bought Aldus. QuarkXPress had been dominant over PageMaker for years, but Adobe poured enough effort into InDesign that when it matured, it defeated XPress in the market, and PageMaker could finally be retired.

Source: I was there. I worked at Aldus, and with the rest of the company I ended up at Adobe with the merger. I used to do tech support for both FreeHand and PageMaker.

There was also a partner program named Illustrator which I believe, and I could be wrong, was the forerunner to PS.

Illustrator was a forerunner to Photoshop only in that it came first, but they are fundamentally different applications. Illustrator is vector-based drawing written at Adobe from the start. Photoshop is a pixel-based photo/painting application that Adobe bought a few years later from the Knoll brothers.

 

[gegjr]

"Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress were both page layout software, also locked in battle through the 1990s"
That's why I prefaced my remarks explaining I was studying Desktop Publishing.

 

[gegjr]

I'd suggest opening from LrC, making sure you choose Edit Original. But in your case it doesn't make too much difference.

Not sure I understand "But in your case it doesn't make too much difference." Please elaborate.

 

[johnbeardy]

Just that if we were dealing with a raw file, it might have LR adjustments and you would definitely want to open it from LR into PS. But you're dealing with TIFs and would usually be processing those files, not producing new files.

 

[Replytoken]

You know the saying about how to eat an elephant one bite at a time? PS is like a giant toolbox and is too big and amorphous to be absorbed in one go, so don't think of "learning PS" but learn it by doing specific bite-sized tasks in it.

This post is a great example. Fixing a specific problem rewards you with a bunch of related tools and techniques, and with little insights. Here gegjrphotography is faced with spots different to those I'd imagined, and wondered if there might be a Lighten mode. So start looking for those little jobs for PS, and nibble away at it!

I absolutely agree, and there is no shortcut for properly learning PS. It is just right now I am at bandwidth overload between health and work issues, and I hardly have time to pick up a camera or work on images already in LR. If health issues do not force my hand, I am hoping that retirement will be a possibility in a few years. Getting to that point in one piece will be the challenge.

--Ken

 

[gegjr]

I absolutely agree, and there is no shortcut for properly learning PS. It is just right now I am at bandwidth overload between health and work issues, and I hardly have time to pick up a camera or work on images already in LR. If health issues do not force my hand, I am hoping that retirement will be a possibility in a few years. Getting to that point in one piece will be the challenge.

--Ken

Ken,
I hear you. I retired about 6 years ago and I thought retirement would give me more time for learning more things. But, some how, the grandkids found out Papa is now retired. A funny story, about 3 or 4 years ago my youngest grandson, who was five at the time, wanted his mom or dad to take him to some event. Neither of them could do it so he asked his mom to call Papa (me) 'cause "he's tired (meaning retired) now". I thought that was so funny coming from him and yet so indicative of what people mistakenly think about being retired.

 

[PhilBurton]

Monster is more like it. Trying to learn PS reminds me of the old days when I went back to university to study desktop publishing when it was in its digital infancy. There were a couple of 'giant' programs, Quark and PageMaker. PageMaker was primarily used by small business internal publishing departments to produce print newsletters (electronic newsletters weren't yet in vogue) by a company named Aldus which was absorbed by Adobe and renamed InDesign. There was also a partner program named Illustrator which I believe, and I could be wrong, was the forerunner to PS.

Note: Aldus PageMaker, later Adobe PageMaker, is a desktop publishing program for Mac and Windows. First released in 1985, PageMaker was the first desktop publishing program for the Macintosh and followed over a year later with the release of 1.0 for the IBM PC. This was a notable application as it was one of the few rare applications which would run under Windows 1.x.​

Anyway, I bring all that up to say PageMaker and Illustrator were Mac only (there was no Apple yet either) programs and they were monster programs with gigantic learning curves!

Back in those early days there was also Ventura Publisher, for DOS PCs only. Eventually they were bought by Xerox and as a Xerox employee at the time, I got a freebie copy.

Adobe Pagemaker also ran on Solaris. Files were interchangeable between PC and Solaris applications. Sometimes pictures inserted in one version appeared upside down in the other version.

 

[Anthony.Ralph]

In LR, no, but I would generally use Photoshop for heavy repairs and have one trick I'd recommend.

It works best on larger areas, for example the sky, and you begin by making a selection on the background layer using the lasso or marquee tool. I then generally feather this selection by 5 pixels or so.

At this point I'll use Ctrl J (Win) or Cmd J on Mac to create a new layer from that selection. So we've got a big patch of sky in its own layer.

The key, assuming we're dealing with dust spots which are light, is to change that sky layer's blending mode to Darken (in Layers palette). This choice of blending mode means that the composite image will prefer pixels from this layer when they are darker than the pixels it finds below them. That definition of Darken blending mode is important to understand.

Switch now to the Move tool (V) and use the keyboard arrow keys to nudge this sky layer a pixel or two up, a pixel or two to the right.

This means that we are moving our layer's good sky pixels over the white dust spot pixels in the layer below. Thinking back to the above definition, Darken blending mode means that the composite image will show this layer's sky layer pixels, in preference to the lighter dust spot pixels below them. Of course, by moving this layer we are also moving its dust spots over good sky areas in the layer below, but Darken also handles this - our sky layer's lighter pixels aren't used because the pixels below are darker.

See if you can follow through the above in Photoshop. I use it with spots, to a lesser extent nowadays with scratches. Small movements are often important. Also, I sometimes reduce my layer's opacity a little, just to hide what I've done.

John

You really are a clever boy John!

 

[johnbeardy]

You really are a clever boy John!

I can't claim any credit for the idea, Anthony - just I hope for the clarity of the explanation