On 01/04/2017 06:58 PM, paulhurm wrote:
> For others who may read this, again, I need help on how to work with the > current > scans I have. I am also not willing to do any re-scanning since some of the > captions seem to be deteriorating and I don't want to handle the pages any > more > that is absolutely necessary. You are up against an intrinsically difficult problem; restoring the photos to their original condition is not possible, and making them "look like" they were restored to original condition would amount to using them as guides for creating new images from scratch. But making radical improvements is not especially difficult. I did the following things with the image you provided: 1) Converted it from indexed to RGB mode. Indexed images do not work and play well with filters. 2) Saved it to XCF, created a duplicate as a new layer and named it "white balance." Then I had a go at correcting for the overall fading, with the Levels tool (Colors > Levels, or add it to your toolbox buttons via Edit > Preferences > Toolbox). The histogram is cut off at both ends, which might be an artifact of destructive compression by the scanner or some program used to process the image. I used the draggable markers at the bottom of the Input Levels display to set the black point to 50 and the white point to 235. This has the effect of "stretching" the histogram from true black to true white. Then I moved the mid-point marker to the right, and settled on 0.45, as a "natural looking" adjustment. 3) Then I created a copy of the corrected layer, and tried a few items from the G'MIC filter pack. Repair > Smooth [median], with a radius of five pixels, knocked the sparkly silver clumps way down with minimal degradation of "wanted" image content. 4) Then I added a mask to the filtered layer, and painted on it in white to bring back some lost resolution in areas with important details (faces, hands, etc.) and, switching to a smaller brush and black, painted on the mask to wipe out some bright specks that were restored along with the "wanted" details that were softened by the smoothing filter. 5) Finally, I created a new layer as a copy of the visible image, set its mode to Multiply, and dialed its opacity down to 33%. This brought the contrast way up. Result: http://pilobilus.net/xfer/p48_TEST_GRAY-EDIT.jpg There is still room for a LOT of corrections, and someone may come up with fundamentally better ideas than the process outlined above. But it's a starting point of a sort, at least. :o) Steve _______________________________________________ gimp-user-list mailing list List address: gimp-user-list@gnome.org List membership: https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user-list List archives: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-user-list