very badly faded photograph

[bshand1]

a young friend gave me a very badly faded photograph of her (now dead) grandparents. mostly all that's left are the cyan colours and she would like me to restore it as much as possible. i have tried myself and have looked over the net for tutorials and found two that were some help but it made not much improvement to the photo. is this a lost cause or do people know things that i don't?

[bshand1]

a young friend gave me a very badly faded photograph of her (now dead) grandparents. mostly all that's left are the cyan colours and she would like me to restore it as much as possible. i have tried myself and have looked over the net for tutorials and found two that were some help but it made not much improvement to the photo. is this a lost cause or do people know things that i don't?

[SandDancr]

Wolfie, did you scan the photo in or was it sent to you via email?

If you scanned it...try increasing the settings...300 dpi instead of 72....very sharp, etc. Sometimes all that's needed is adjusting the scanner settings, in order to get a workable image.

Otherwise, can you either post it...or email it to me, and I'll take a look and see what I can do with it.

Joelle

The sandcastles of our lives are nothing when compared to the tides of our destinies.

[bshand1]

thanks for the reply.

yes, i scanned it, but not at home, so i needed to keep the file small. i wondered at the time how in what format i should save it. i used jpeg and i think it would have been better as a bitmap of somekind. what do you suggest for psp? i'm going there again next week so i'll scan it again a a much higher resolution. then i'l see what i/we can do. thanks for the offer of help, i appreciate it, but i would also like to learn to do it myself.

i'm an old photoshop user, but have given it up with advent of version 6, which really needs to be run on a stand alone pc with two hard drives (one for the swap) and that's crazy for the likes of me. i've done this kind of work with photoshop but i can't get psp-v7 to do the same. i'm sure it will (i haven't found anything it wont do yet!), i just need to learn to do it.

[BobS]

Wolfie, I use PSP7 for retouching old photos for the web often. It's great for that task -- and much cheaper than PhotoShop!

Scan at the higher resolution, but save in another lossless bitmap format such as TIF or PNG. Or, if your scanner allows, choose the highest quality setting for JPG.

The resulting file will likely be too big for a 3.5 floppy.

Bob