Cleaning Up Old Photos

[Rob MacKillop]

I've been asked to digitise and clean up a lot of Susan's old family photos. It looks likely to be a time consuming job! I scan them at 300dpi, save as jpegs, then open them in Photoshop Elements, where I do a quick Auto Fix. That tends to give a better exposure.

The problem: many of the images have these dots all over them, which I can get rid of by using the Spot Healing and Clone tools, but it takes ages. Any quick fix for this job?



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Actually, when I look at that image in this posting, it only shows a few dots. But in Photoshop it shows many dozens.

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One came out nicely in black and white, but it took a while...



It was her 21st birthday...aww...

 

[Beth Anthony]

duplicate your layer
run the remove dust and scratches filter, add a mask and make it black.
duplicate the dust and scratches filter with the mask.
set one of the layers to blending mode lighten, one to blending mode darken.
on the darken layer use a white brush on the white spots with a black background
on the lighten layer use a black brush on the darker spots with a lighter background

to make things easy i zoom in to the photo and drop guidelines in a grid so that each square on the grid fills the frame, then just go block by block with your white brushes. you can be pretty sloppy with this so it goes a little faster than with the clone tool.


rhona looks a lot like her mom.

 

[Rob MacKillop]

Thanks, Beth. When you write it all out like that, it doesn't seem like it will be any quicker, but probably gives a better result. I'll give it a try.

When Rhona was born, the poor thing looked just like me. As she gets older, she's turning into her mum/mom. Much better!

 

[Brian Moore]

Polaroid, eh? Nice!

 

[Rob MacKillop]

 

[Joan West]

Here's something that I posted awhile ago and I use a lot (originally by Stuart Little)

Stuart Little's 35mm Slide ( or anything you fancy) Retouching
Open in camera raw, change size in workflow options, increase the size by 2, put a tick in "open as smart object" - then use crop tool 2x3 or 3x2 - straighten if needed - adjust image to suit don't add clarity at this point, use spot removal brush for small bits and bobs (not big stuff).

For local adjustments use the adjustment brush with all sliders reset - then use the adjustment brush to add clarity, saturation etc to areas that need it.

Open as a smart object in Photoshop - save as a PSD - add blank layer - use clone/patch etc for bigger bits and bobs then either flatten or use ctrl + alt + shift + E to give a flattened layer but keeping layers intact if prefered.

Use adjustment layers to finish if required. May sound a lot of work but once you get into the swing of it you'll find it works a treat

Joan

 

[Rob MacKillop]

Does sound like a lot of work, but I'll give it a try. Thanks, Joan.