I have 2 colour photos that have badly faded over time. Sadly I have lost the negatives. I would dearly love to get the colour back. I can scan the existing photos into my computer, any suggestion as to how I may recover the colour please? Ideas as to software that may do it would be most welcomed.
The short answer is that you can't if the fading has gone too far. If there is still enough to see the right colours albeit with a colour shift to cyan then you can split the image down and tweak to recover the density but at the expense of a fair amount of noise.
But the simplest approach that might work is separate the image into intensity and colour components in your software and then use histogram adjust to sort out the luminance. You might get away with the same trick separating to RGB but it is a bit pot luck. Generally the red/magenta dye which absorbs energetic short wave photons is almost completely gone. Best you can get is a monochrome image back.
A less scientific approach is to open it in Photoshop and use the 'auto' enhance tools. Can be surprisingly effective. You won't get it perfect but hey, it will be much better.
Bill
En el artículo , Broadback escribió:
For a quick and dirty solution - may do the trick:
Load the image into Irfanview
press shift-U to improve colours
press shift-S to sharpen.
I use this a lot, it saves a lot of farting about in Photoshop or the GIMP.
And if you don't have photoshop, there are some colour tools in Picasa.
I almost mentioned Irfanview (but I gave up after finding the learning curve a bit steep)
GIMP also is pretty good as is Corel Photopaint.
I've done a a bit of this, and my experience is that faded colors across the whole print is relatively easy, its where its been shaded by the frame, that is gets really hard.
First thing I'd do would be to take them to the Max Spielmann counter in your local Tesco: you would be surprised at how cheap the services there are, and the staff are generally experts in my experience.
If they can't help, you're back to mucking around with your own software and printer ... which is, after all the DIY solution.
J.
The software that comes with most digital cameras should have the capability for changing contrast/brightness/colour saturation etc.
En el artículo , alan_m escribió:
He's got *printed* photos (with no negatives available) that he wants to revive. Did you even read the original post?
Probably better than you! He said he could scan them...
I remember touching up photos etc with pen & brush, now any main free graphics program can do that & much more. Gimp is very popular & powerful, though not the best UI.
NT
If he's got no other software he could rephotograph them and tweak them in the camera.
Bill
Assuming it will actually run on your computer..
So, use your digital camera to photograph the prints.:-)
But anyway, image processing software that is supplied with a few digital cameras is not limited to the pictures that camera has taken.
Actually it isn't such a bad suggestion many digital cameras and scanners come with a slightly hobbled version of Photoshop or some cheaper equivalent on a CD that might be usable for this job.
That is a workable solution if the photographs are in an album which is too cumbersome to put on a scanner, but a decent scanner will always win since it can generate a much higher resolution file. And in the getting signal out of noise game more raw data always helps.
Very even illumination is key to success when photographing like this along with avoiding reflections off the probably glossy surface. A big sheet of black card or cloth helps as does deliberately taking the shot slightly off square and using perspective correction to fix it up.
Otherwise you will get a faint reflection of the camera lens and your face in the digital image.
PaintShopPro or Photoshop Elements are amongst the better 'Doze packages for complex tweaking of images. Or free Picasa (though watch its meglomanaic tendencies) and a bit more fiddly Irfanview (very good at opening obscure and ancient image file types).
You reckon?
An A4 page scanned at 300DPI is 8Mpx give or take
How big is your print?
Frankly a decent DSLR photographing a 120 or 35mm neg on a lightbox is going to do a far far better job.
AND a quicker one
It may have a bit of distortion, that's all.
And in the getting
Worst case you are hand colorizing a monochrome photo by guessing the colours, which is a thing that people do still do sometimes. I agree that's not really "recovering" the colour, but it's possible some of the techniques will be useful if parts are too faded.
There are options to scan images or negatives at much higher resolutions and have been since the turn of the century.
My scanner does 9600dpi native resolution although on most images that is way too much it is useful on contact prints from larger negatives used in the past and 600dpi is about right for good quality postcards.
Than a 9600dpi scanner like the Canon Lide 700? - no chance. It has other faults but a lack of resolution isn't one of them.
My DSLR could just about match its robust predecessor the venerable HP5300c which is limited to 1200dpi native optical resolution.
A bit of trapezoid distortion is worth it to avoid reflections of the photographic gear appearing in the image. Very often old documents will not sit happily on a scanner bed without inflicting damage on them.
But if it will fit on a scanner then the scanner nearly always wins.
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