Advice on photo restoration

[mikerob2334]

I'm trying to get some practice on restoring old photos. I know there is specialized software available, but I'm trying to learn what can be accomplished in Elements. Below is my first try at a photo restoration. The main problem I was having in Elements was the best way to get rid of the texture. I found some interesting actions and filters to help with this, the only problem is they would only work in photoshop or would not work on a Mac. To remove as much texture as possible, I used a blur. Of course, this cut down on the contrast/sharpness and further adjustment layers just brings the texture back out. Does anyone have a suggestion on removing textures like this using only PSE? Any other advice or observations on the restoration attempt would be welcome. Thanks


before-after by mikerob2334, on Flickr

[teaking]

Have you looked at frequency seperation its a technique used in forensics and also retouching it enables you to seperated high pass detail from low pass details so all the texture in an image is in one layer and all the shapes and colour information is in another layer you can go a step further and seperate colour as well perfect for restoration work but a bit more complex.

Theres videos on youtube I would say its worth a luck if only for interest

[mikerob2334]

Originally Posted by teaking

Have you looked at frequency seperation its a technique used in forensics and also retouching it enables you to seperated high pass detail from low pass details so all the texture in an image is in one layer and all the shapes and colour information is in another layer you can go a step further and seperate colour as well perfect for restoration work but a bit more complex.

Theres videos on youtube I would say its worth a luck if only for interest

Are you talking about FFT? If so, I have been unable to find one that works with PSE. I'm trying to avoid buying another program just to play around with it. I found a free program that does FFT (ImageJ) but it did terrible.

[teaking]

Hiya,

Im talking more about a manual way to seperate the frequencies of you image rather than filtering so you can edit frequencies seperately for different reasons.

Heres a link to a thread relating to the concept its kinda heavy going but worth a read
ModelMayhem.com - HighPass Sucks (+ solution)

Heres some videos on youtube as well that give a visual representation
YouTube - Frequency Separation LOW-HIGH-COLOR (ENGLISH)
YouTube - Frequenzy Separation Texture Add (ENGLISH)
YouTube - Frequency Separation Technique

I know this works in pbotoshop and I can achieve the process in gimp by a slightly differrnt process, hopefully it can be done in elements hope this sheds some light on the topic.

[mikerob2334]

teaking, thanks for the info but it appears elements does not have all the tools needed to complete this

[julieamary]

If you really want to restore old photos then you should try best photo restoration mac software and beside if you want to add texture in to your photographs then you should try a photo editor application to which fare able to add texture. Apart from this photo restoration mac utility able to restores your deleted or corrupted photos from the mac hard drives including external storage media. It recovers lost photos in few minutes and save your valuable time.