Help with old prints

[mbrammeld]

Hi everyone, i'm new to this site and was wondering if there is anything that can be done to these prints? also could anyone recommend any software i could use?
Thanks, Mark

[Luiz]

The B&W for me is great! the colour one you could try to make it B&W as well. I guess others have a better view as I am new to digital too.

[Luiz]

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f78/goofysailor/9.jpghttp://s45.photobucket.com/albums/f78/goofysailor

[Luiz]

I hope this is what you were looking for?

[Hype]

I had a shot at the first one quickly, About to pop out but will have a go at the second one later.

I used Photoshop CS4

Noise Ninja Plugin
Levels
Curves
Unsharp Mask
Cloned and healed a few bad spots
Dodge & Burn
Another go with curves.
Slight Guassian Blur
Unsharp Mask

Link to Biggest Size (Click Here (http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2707/4153692714_a7bdf81800_o.jpg))

The result:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2707/4153692714_75959f4ee9_b.jpg

[Hype]

Ok, Managed to go over this one quickly whilst wife is shouting at me to hurry up, haha.

Basically just used Noise Ninja plugin, Clone & Heal, Unsharp mask and few others, worked fast on it so kind of never made notes of what was done, Sorry :)

Quite a lot more that could of been done to aid the colours but I thought I would just tidy it up slightly and if anyone else wants to have a go they can even try to carry on from where I left off.

Link to larger image (Click Here (http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2780/4152982291_6f6f3e0097_o.jpg))

The result:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2780/4152982291_42067a7d9d_b.jpg

[Pat]

Hi mbrammeld and welcome. I agree with Luiz, i really like the black and white one with the children. The scanning process left these pics with a lot of artifacts that are impossible to eliminate without some loss of clarity.

What I did in Photoshop was...
Go into Image-Adjust-Shadows and Highlights and applied the following settings: Shadows Amount; 10%, Highlights Amount; 46%. I left all other settings in the default position.
I then selected the shadows and applied the above mentioned Noise Ninja.
Selected the highlights and applied a 0.9% gaussian blur.
I then increased the contrast, darkened the whole image a little and applied a moderate amount of sharpening.
With the increase in contrast and sharpening a whole bunch of white pixels appeared which I cleaned up with DCE Tools' "Hot Pixel Fix" plugin.


With the cow i...
Applied a layer mask and painted out the cow and bike in the foreground.
Applied a gaussian blur to the rest.
Increase contrast on the cow and bike.
Cleaned up the few hot pixels with the spot healing brush tool.


There are lots of photo editing programs to choose from. Some are expensive, some are free. Here's a listing on Google that you might like to have a look at. (http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=Photo+editing+software&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=)

[mbrammeld]

Thanks Luiz, i have to resist the urge to change all my colour prints to black and white as i have a real bias, but when somebody else does it for me thats great :)

[Luiz]

You welcome. I do it to many of my old photos ;)

[mbrammeld]

thanks everyone for your input :) , Pat i don't seem to be able to locate your versions of the prints??
Mark

[Pat]

Whoops, heh heh, er...ummmm....Must have been a computer glitch.
Yeah. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

[StephenK]

These were just fun to play around with......!

I ran the cow through a bunch of stuff just to see what would happen... One of the things that's cool to
experiment with is to take a channels mask, apply it to a copy of the image, and then add a few FX options
to the layer to see what comes of it....

A drop shadow behaves very differently when run through a channels mask! It can darken the tones from within...

I changed the black and white image to RGB and then was experimenting with the Selective Color adjustment
layer.... mostly within the Whites, Neutrals, and Blacks range...
You can actually make it look something like a Duotone image if you adjust it just right... never really played
much with Selective Color... It's not a bad option! :^)

[jmtc]

Hi
Loved the photo but felt the background distracting.
I isolated the girls and the bike and usin blur tool in PS I blured the background, as though you had used a fast lens, say f/1.8
Hope you like? You could do the same with the other picture also.
Regards
Jim

[mbrammeld]

Thank you everyone for taking the time out to have a go at these prints,you have all done a great job and its interesting to see all the different options and styles. i have just downloaded Gimp and will have a play around with it:D