Can This Photo Be Saved?
Hey there GingerScrappers! I thought this week we’d look at something a little different. With Mother’s Day almost upon us and lots of old photos being pressed into service, I know there are some of you out there who wish your scanned pix were just a little less… blurry. So I’m going to show you a super-duper-simple trick for tightening up those images a bit.
I started with this photo taken in May, 1955; I found it in a box of my mom’s photos. (No, that isn’t me in there.) First I dealt with the dust spots and scratches using the Spot Healing brush then I was ready to sharpen it.
It’s not horrible, but it’s a little… um… soft. So I Duplicated the image (WSNH= CTRL/CMD>J).
Working on the topmost layer I just created, I clicked on the Filter tab, scrolled down to Other and selected High Pass…
The Tool menu opens up a dialog box as shown. I selected a Radius of 1.0 pixels. There is now a gray-scale image of my photo, with some details visible.
To make this filter adjust the appearance of my photo, I’m going to change the Blend Mode for the topmost layer to Overlay. If you don’t feel there’s been enough sharpening, you can Undo (CTRL/CMD>Z) and increase the Radius until you’re happy. But be careful. A word of caution: Don’t keep adding layers with High Pass filters on top of each other because you’ll end up with something quite bizarre-looking.
Can you see the difference between this image and the untouched one? Facial features are a little clearer.
By setting the Radius to 3.0 pixels, there’s more detail visible on the filter layer.
When you get to the point where the Filter layer looks a lot like the original, it might be time to stop. Too MUCH is not better. Less in this case can actually be more.
I was pleased to see that the resulting image was sharp, the contrast was good and my photo now looked a lot better. So I Merged the two layers (CTRL/CMD>E) and saved my photo as an edit.
I can hear you mumbling about colour photos… so I’m ready for that too! This photo was in the same box, and was taken in 1978.
At a Radius of 1.0, there’s faint detail visible, and only gray-scale.
It looks a bit better, but not much!
At a Radius of 2.0, there’s a faint hint of colour showing through, and a bit more detail.
The area that seems to show the most sharpening effect is the window. Notice that the colours are darkening too.
The higher I take the Radius, the more colour shows through.
What happens if I’m tired of inching up and just make a jump to say… 7.0 pixels?
The colours have darkened a lot and some detail is actually lost. To save this one at this degree of sharpening, I’d have to make quite a few tweaks of Lighting, Brightness and Contrast and I run the risk of making the photo look really phony. So I suggest you don’t save this version over the original, but as an edited copy so if you’re sickened by how far you took the image (as I was with some of my Ireland trip photos… blech!) you still have the original and can start over with a lighter hand.
I plan to make a layout with the first image for the Inspired by a Word/Words iNSD challenge from JoCee Designs. When it’s finished I’ll add in a link so you can see it if you want to.
In April there were 4 people who linked me up to layouts where they’d used one or more of these tutorials. Ellen had several, but to be fair, she only is on the list once. Mr Random has selected Bekki Braun Fekete (aka bekfek) as this month’s winner. Bekki, put your thinking cap on!
Remember, if you’ve used a technique from these tutorials, post your finished layout in the GingerScraps Facebook Tutorial Tuesday Challenge Gallery for an opportunity to have YOUR chance to challenge me. If you’re not a Facebooker, you can post a link to the layout you’ve created with the tutorial you used in the comments section here on the Blog. I’ll get a notification and will then enter you into the draw. The first week of each month I’ll have a random draw of all entries and the winner will be announced at the end of the first tutorial of that month.
Next week’s tutorial will be for Michelle (aka Belis2mi). She needs some help with organization, so stay tuned. You might find a tip or two you can use!
This is tutorial comes at just the right time! I am currently scanning a bunch of photos when are kids were small (the 70’s & 80’s) and after cleaning some of them up, they don’t look very sharp. I had no idea about the High Pass filter! Question: at what dpi do you scan your photos? The default on my printer/scanner is 200 dpi, but since we create LOs at 300 dpi, I been using that … however, the photos look very pixelated when I zoom in — and often times look very dusty. I’ve also scanned at 600 dpi, which takes away a lot of the “dust”, but then the photo (to me) looks slightly blurry… what do you recommend?
Thanks for the tutorial!!
It seems like I’m picking up psychic messages from some of you loyal GingerScrappers…
Pam, I’ve scanned photos on several different brands of scanner with a wide variation in clarity and quality. The images I’m happiest with are actually from my FlipPal scanner, which is about the size of a thinnish trade paperback. It was designed for genealogists so is 100% portable. I’ve got it set at 600 dpi. I try and remove as much dust as possible from the photo before I put it on the scanner bed – I use a Swiffer sheet on both the photo and she scanner’s glass, which really cuts down on the clean-up. If I need to I repair scratches and cracks, Spot Heal any little bits of dust I can still see and crop so the horizon is… well… horizontal Then I play with High Pass until I like the result. I hope that helps.
Thank you so very much. I have so many pictures that I have scanned from my mother’s photo album that go back as far as the late 1800’s. Then some of my cousins have sent me their family albums that even go back further than that. Now I plan to go back to those old pictures and try the high pass to see if I can improve on my edit of those photos. Some were so old and in such poor condition that one can barely make out who is in the photo.
I have a photo of my dad that was found in an old internet copy of a 1942 mining magazine. Daddy was a miner and died when he was only 52 years old in 1968. Daddy had worked in some horrible mines that were never forced to follow the laws at that time for safety and health issues. Even with this very poor quality newspaper-like photo of him, so often I must give thanks to God for it. I am now going to try another attempt at improving this photo to see if the high pass might just help improve it some. Thank you so much for posting this.
You have given us so many incredible tutorials here. Do you ever offer a PDF file for download of them? I would love to have the PDF files so I can go back and refresh my memory of how to do something. My computer tries to give up and shut down too many times when I have Photoshop Elements running at the same time as being on the internet.
God bless you.
Carol, that newspaper photo must be so precious to you. I don’t know if the High Pass filter will do much for it but it can’t hurt to try.
You’re the third person who has asked me about PDFs. I do all my composition here on WordPress and the content belongs to GingerScraps. I’ve looked for conversion software a couple of times. The only one I could find was quite old and isn’t compatible with this version of WP. I’ll keep looking, see what I can do.
Jan, thanks for the info regarding scan settings. I’ve found that when I “blow them up” the higher setting works the best. & thanks for the tip about the swiffer sheet. 🙂
Pam… I think I’ve figured it out! So, I had a brainwave yesterday… I tried an experiment and found a way for you to save the tuts as .pdf files and it’s easy as pie! If you’re using a reasonably new computer, you should have an option to send your documents to a PDF writer. So if you highlight the text and the images in the forum’s tutorial view then select Print, in the printer menu change the Destination to Microsoft (or whatever your system has installed) PDF and it should appear in the preview pane. It worked both at home on my laptop and here at work on this antiquated piece of garbage we do our charting on. Give it a try!