Old B&W Photo Restoration Software

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kitjv

kitjv

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My daughter has a lot of old B&W family photos on her computer. I am interested in restoring these photos as best as possible. I have been a LR user for years, but feel that it has limitations in this area. Therefore, I am curious as to the experience that some of you might have had with dedicated photo restoration software (compatible with Mac). Admittedly, I am not sufficiently familiar with PS's capabilities in this area. But I am certainly willing to delve into PS if it has the best photo restoration capabilities.

Thank you for any thoughts or experience you can offer.
 
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The older photos I have worked had combinations of scratches, blemishes, out of focus, poor contrast, and poor lighting; and maybe other problems I don't recall right now. Each photo was different. I primarily used Photoshop, along with a combo of Topaz GigaPixel AI and Sharpen AI. Some photos needed resizing, others sharpening, others needed work on the faces, and the Topaz products did pretty well there; sometimes equally well, other times one was better than the other.
Most of my PS work was with the healing brushes and cloning tools. The Neural beta Photo Restoration tool worked sometimes, most of the times it gave a good start. The use of PS layers was very important.
 
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While the new selection tools in Lr are fab, for detailed, pixel level editing, it is hard to beat the granularity and precision and tools available in Photoshop. A plugin for PS called Lumenzia by Greg Benz is super for creating luminosity masks, which can be extremely useful for mono images which do not have colour. There are several other Luminosity Mask tools. Greg Benz tutorials are a good place to understand Luminosity Masks.

However to use the masks created, you do need basic PS skills (Ie understand layers, masks, selections, use of brushes, use of curves).

Skill builds up with practice, just ensure you keep a version of the original safe before starting an editing session.
 
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I have been quite impressed with PS's new Neural Filters. One in particular can do a pretty good job on "old photos". Give it a try.


1678327037077.png


Bottom - Photo Restoration
1678327090317.png
 
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If it helps, here’s a quick demo of the Photo Restoration Neural Filter in Photoshop. To keep the file size down, the demo plays at 1.5x speed. The old photo is from the lesson files in the Adobe Photoshop Classroom in a Book. In this demo, I expanded the Adjustments section just so you know what’s in there, but they were not needed for this photo.

Photoshop Neural Filters Photo Restoration.gif


Photo Restoration might not be perfect, but if you set the Output menu to send the results to a new layer, you can then blend it with the original, keeping what you want and masking out what you don’t want. And if you set the Output menu to Smart Filter, you can edit the filter later. In a lot of cases it can take out some of the worst problems like the huge scratch in a few seconds, so all you have to do is clean up the few remaining problems, using something like the Spot Healing Brush tool. In this example, after clicking OK, I would continue on and manually retouch out the black spot near the lip, and a few other spots near the edges.

These AI features work faster with a more recent computer, for example Apple Silicon on the Mac side. The performance here (again, shown playing back at 1.5x speed) is on a MacBook Pro with the base (8-core CPU, 14-core GPU) M1 Pro processor. Expect an older Intel Mac to be noticeably slower; the 7-second time estimate for Scratch Reduction seen in the progress bar here works out to a 32-second estimate on my 4-core Intel Core i5 with Intel integrated graphics in a 5-year-old MacBook Pro.
 
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Thank you, everyone. You confirmed my suspicions that PS has the best arsenal of tools for this project. Although I am comfortable with most of the PS basics, it will take a bit of learning in order to get up to speed. But, for me, I'm always up for a new learning experience. Thanks again.
 
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