Restoring an old photograph

questions about practical use of Neat Image
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fractalbit

Restoring an old photograph

Post by fractalbit »

I am AMAZED with this software. I had a very bad old image that was printed in a weird papar with some pattarns. So beside some noise from the scan the image contained those patterns that i thought i would never be able to get rid of them. I was wrong! I passed the original image 5 times from neat image and after some adjustments in photoshop here are the results :

Image

I know this is may not the best i could do but i am not very experienced with phtoshop. Anyway i am really amazed from the neat image software. Congratulations!

You can see some more exaples in this thread :

http://www.dpgr.gr/forum/index.php?boar ... 37;start=0

The forum is in greek but the images speak for themselves (they are crops from the full images, to not alter the characteristics from the resize)
andewid
Posts: 62
Joined: Sat May 01, 2004 8:21 pm

Post by andewid »

Good example. However I think she looks a little to plastic. I tried to made my own version =)

Image
greenup
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2004 3:23 am
Location: montana
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Re: Restoring an old photograph

Post by greenup »

fractalbit wrote:... I had a very bad old image that was printed in a weird paper with some patterns...
I have come across this print type (with the hexagons) before myself; it is VERY annoying. I had once heard that there was an image processing tool that was designed to specifically deal with this pattern, but I have never found it.

Neat image does a fair job on this problem, if you push at it a lot. Unfortunately, that frequently means pushing it too hard and getting "plasticy" results.

Another tool I have tried to use is a fourier filter plugin for The Gimp, (shows up in the menus as "Render|FFT Direct" and "Render|FFT Inverse") in the frequency spectrum, the hexagons show up as an obvious (well, VERY DIM, but obvious) star pattern that can be airbrushed out, but with my skill level, results are usually approximately as good as Neat Image. That tool/method is pretty primative; Does anyone know of a better way?
fractalbit wrote: I know this is may not the best i could do but i am not very experienced with photoshop.
That picture was a wonderful example of the extreme power of Neat Image, but also probably a fair example of "overdoing it". (but that may just be personal preference, because I happen to like less "unsharp mask" than most people, and thought that pic looked better with a little less contrast) I wish I could find a good deconvolution tool that didn't take days and days of practice for each picture.
Image
JR
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Jun 14, 2005 9:26 pm

Post by JR »

I tried to process your image with Neat Image,too. This image may be a good example to test the limit of what Neat Image can do.

original image:
Image

filtered (by Neat Image v5.0.2.0 demo) and cropped image:
Image
kirkt
Posts: 18
Joined: Wed Nov 16, 2005 4:36 pm

Using NI appropriately

Post by kirkt »

While NI can do a lot, it does it on noise. Regular (periodic) patterns are often better addressed with a more appropriate technique like Fast Fourier Transform filtering.

See:

http://kirkt.smugmug.com/gallery/988997

for a detailed example using the original image.

Image

What's nice about this image, from a FFT filtering standpoint, is the presence of a nice uniform background where you can isolate a patch of the repeated pattern, copy it to a new document, take the FFT of it and look at the power spectrum of just the regular pattern you wish to suppress. This gives you an idea of how to construct your filter mask for supressing the pattern in the photograph.
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