Touch Ups for Scanned Photos

When we take traditional film photos, we always have them processed as 4x6 inch prints. Smaller 3x5 prints might save a dollar or two but the 4x6 size allows for a better scan. The larger print size helps to improve the finished result you'll be viewing on-screen. Prints are usually easier to scan than negatives, if you're archiving your old film photos on your computer.

You may get slightly better results scanning color prints or negatives than with a digital camera, however there are trade-offs. When scanning, there are usually all kinds of flaws. The print itself may not be perfect. The contrast and colors might not be quite right. No matter how careful you are, there is almost always dust on the scanned image that winds up being obvious on the computer screen.

Advantages of Adobe Photoshop

The first thing we do is scan the prints ... negatives or slides ... at the highest resolution possible and save in uncompressed tiff format. This makes for a huge file, but we have more to work with for a better end result. We’ll reduce the file size later. We then use Adobe's Photoshop to adjust and clean up each photo.

With Photoshop we rotate and crop each photo. No matter how careful we are when taking a picture we're usually off a few degrees from being aligned. We rotate the photo using the horizon in the distance or vertical lines of buildings or trees as a reference for what's supposed to be straight. Then we crop the photo to make it look appealing, sometimes removing a bit from side to side or top to bottom if there's something there that wasn't intended to be; say the tip of a finger in front of the lens.

Then we remove the dust or other spots that shouldn't be there. There are several tools in Photoshop that achieve this rather well. (We use an outdated version of Photoshop. Newer versions might be somewhat different.) The dust and scratches filter is good at removing multiple dust spots but we caution against using it on the entire image. This filter tends to remove important details of the photo if not used correctly. If you select only the part of the image that has severe dust on it, and then use the dust and scratches filter, you won't affect the rest of the photo. Other handy utensils for dust are the smudge and healing brush tools. Dust is most often visible in the sky, and since there is little detail there, these tools will wipe away the dust spots easily.

Eliminating Spoilage

After all the dust is gone we might remove other items that spoil the photo such as jet contrails or wires. The clone stamp tool works well for this, as you can stamp a portion of the sky next to the imperfection and replace the undesirable part with what you just cloned. Afterwards the smudge tool, or the blur tool, will help to blend the sky back to a natural look. Think of it like finger painting. (This gets a little trickier if the imperfection is in a detailed portion of the photo.) Finally, we might sharpen the image a bit with one of the sharpening filters. Don't over do it though. Over-sharpened photo images tend to look phony.

Continue with "Contrast and Sharp"

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