Restoration of scanned old photos

I find this discussion interesting because I have had this problem, and have felt there ought to be more options, not necessarily in PL, but somewhere. I use an Epson V700 scanner, and find that the color restoration option in the Epson Scan software sometimes gives good results, but sometimes does not. I guess it depends on whether there is enough colour information in the original for it to be worked on.

But given that the scanner software proves that it is possible to do a lot automatically, I have been surprised to find that this feature does not seem to be available in any of the editing apps I have tried (PL5, LR, PhotoshopCS6, Affinity, C1. One reason for wanting this is so that instead of using the scanner, I could sometimes use a camera with macro lens and gadgets like the Olympus or Soligor slide copiers (MUCH faster than a scanner).

A lot depends on what type of photo you are scanning and how accurate you want to be. Example, I have an Ambrotype (collodion positive) from around 1855. This is emulsion brushed onto glass and hand painted after exposure. There is no way that any auto process could deal with this.

Another type is the Cabinet Card. These existed from the 1860s till the 1920s, however, the actual process and, therefore, image colour varied over the years. It is difficult to get an accurate colour rendition of these.

Early colour prints often have distorted colour either due to age or because they were not printed properly to begin with. The latter is quite common with colour prints from the 1960s onwards. People just seemed not to care what the colour was as long as the photo was in colour.

I have an HP scanner that has two different colour lighting tubes. This does a multiple pass 6 colour process. It is capable of accurate colour rendition but that is dependant on what it is scanning. Some of the older emulsions can cause the scanner’s sensor to misread the the actual colour of the print.

Even with “black and white” prints there are variations in the tonality e.g. warm or cold papers, warm or cold emulsions, processing chemicals etc. I always scan B&W prints in 16 bit colour.

I have many family photos going back to 1850 (a hand-painted sepia style paper print) and all of them have damage or dust spots that have to be removed.

For negatives, I use my camera and shoot raw rather than use my scanner.

Overall, an editor such as Photoshop is the best tool. Corel PhotoImpact is also good for this.

Allan

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Photographing a negative works with large negatives. I’ve been scanning 110 film from the 1970’s. A negative is only 16 mm wide. I scan at 2800 dpi. 4" X 6" prints aren’t great, film grain is obvious, but it’s the only way.

It works with all negatives, given the right equipment.

The negative format is 13 × 17 mm. Meaning, with a 2:1 macro lens I get a 26 × 34 frame size.

The “scan” with an (absolute overkill for the crappy 110 IQ) would then be something like 5800 dpi. Don’t worry, more dpi only show more details in the grain structure, the picture itself will look even worse and it’s a waste of disk space. Useless, as there were only few 110 cameras with a lens worth talking about, the rest was plastic waste. Pentax 110 SLR or Minolta 110 comes in mind.


I could not even get the whole negative as I have no macro 2:1 for Nikon (only 2.5:1…5:1 or 1:1), and the one for Fuji is in a set-up for 135 negative reproductions. So it was just a quick and dirty try because you said:

Thank you for reminding me to never use this phrase. There is always another way. If the sentence is phrased like “it’s the only way I know of”, it comes closer to reality.

Hello,

please give Vuescan a chance, because it works also with flatbed scanners and multifunction scanners like my old Epson workforce print, scan, fax unit.
If the photos has already be scanned and you don’t want to scan them again in tif format go on the way you ´want with PL, AP, PS or any software.

And pleas give more detailed input about your scanner, or share a scanned jpg if you want better support for your problem

Enjoy the day

May I ask why you are talking about VueScan which has nothing on board to fix old colors automatically? I don’t think it’s the problem of scan software but the problem of how to deal with already finished JPGs. I’m still thinking, the person advising to save JPGs should be in charge to repeat the scans. So even if the scans would be done again, VueScan has no magic recipe to solve the main problem.

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Hello JoJu,

Vuescan supports hardware possibility of the scanner. For the Coolscan for example it supports ICE, ROC, GEM and DDE
Here is a part of Filmscanner Nikon Coolscan 5 V ED, Diascanner LS-50: Test-Bericht, Erfahrungsbericht, Bildqualität, AuflÜsung, Funktionsbeschreibung
“The Coolscan 5 ED comes with a whole range of image optimisation and image correction methods. The automatic dust and scratch correction ICE, the film grain elimination GEM as well as the colour restoration ROC are already known from the predecessor model LS-40 ED. New additions are DDE and a Scan Image Enhancer. DDE is part of the new Advanced ICE4 and performs exposure corrections. The Scan Image Enhancer optimises the colours and contrast of the image. Unfortunately, what the Coolscan V cannot do compared to the LS-5000 are multiple scans.”
Edit:And for example with Vuescan you can do multiple pass scanning

Take a look at UnterstĂźtzte Scanner | VueScan Scanner Software

There is also the possibility to test the software, and like Joanna said there is no magic, because it depends on the basic material. And if we don’t get more information I will stop here :innocent:

Happy sweating

The scanner in question (of @Yakawar ) is a brother, type not specified and it’s very likely a flatbed scanner.

ICE is for films, should recognize dust particles on colour films but no help for faded colours and the rest of the listed abbreviations I’m not familiar with. I guess nothing of it is helping to restore faded out colors of prints? At least VueScan can’t help here. Nikon Coolscan also can’t help - we simply don’t know if the negatives are still at hand. In my experience of 10 years ago, VueScan often doesn’t recognize image frames (of slides or negatives). I had one “smaller” Epson before I bought a V750 with Silverfast (even worse to learn) and VueScan. VueScan is great for old scanners which are no longer supported, but it’s not meant for hundreds of films and a flatbed scanner with transmitted light unit. It moves the scanner’s sensor to each “recognized” frame separately which is a very noisy and weary process.

You’re focused on film scanning as I also was when I read the first post. It’s less about scanning but color restoration, I think.

You are probably right and yes I was talking mainly from the point of view of film and slides. But I had also written about Affinity Photo and the Topaz products in a previous post.
And for those who don’t know the Vuescan software yet, here are a few lines about it.
Perhaps also of interest is that Vuescan is available for Mac and Windows

And you might add, that Ed Hamrick usually is rather helpful when it comes to needed features. Except he finds out that he can’t help. Trying to get a better frame recognition was such a case… at the time he wanted me to send him 1 GB of scan DNG I simply had not the necessary bandwidth at hand.

VueScan is also the only scan-software I’m aware of able to scan (not exactly true to specs) DNG RAW which it can read. So, instead of crashing my scanner’s mechanics I made one scan of 24 slides / negatives 135 or 8 frames 120 to one machine and the opened the files on another machine to separate the full scan into single images. Sometimes it worked…

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Just as a supplement, here are the settings for my Epson Workforce

image

image
don’t know if Restore Colors works well

image

Maybe I will look for an old photo with color cast and make some tests

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So, VueScan has kind of filtering. That’s interesting, haven’t seen that in my version (but that was an old one, just updated). Now I gonna brag: To test it, I’d need some pictures with bad colors. But I have none… :rofl: no, I’m actually too lazy to look for some. I flipped through old prints, but all of them held their colors well. Some are 30-40 years old.

When set to ‘professional’ mode, this tab


shows some possibilities to adjust the scanner to the pic.

Take a prescan and watch the preview while going through the settings, starting w/ Color balance …
Adjust the single colour channels to (hopefully) counteract colour cast.

And these settings
grafik
might help (a bit) with faded colours, but I wouldn’t count on that.


For film (slides) I prefer to take a pic w/ my cam and then work on the raw-file,
while Vuescan’s output is a TIFF-file in reality.

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Hi Wolfgang,
I know the prof mode and the amount of settings, even if I do not always know the meaning :smile:

The screens was only to show that Vuescan has a restore Color setting also for flatbed scanners.

For film/slides I worked with these settings with my Nikon and Plustek scanner

Thanks to all for all the input

Guenter