“You dont get something for nothing, You dont get freedom for free, You wont get wise With the sleep still in your eyes, No matter what your dreams might be” Neil Peart

***This part of the tutorial is a little more involved, but is still totally “do-able” in Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Gimp, to name a few, and is ranked “Easy to Middlin” on the restoration scale.***

I hope by now we can all see that while correcting photos taken from a newspaper may not be an exercise in futility, it’s not all that far off! I had a couple customers, at the beginning of my restoration career, that were disappointed that the photo from the newspaper they brought me, or the copy of the photo from the newspaper, didn’t look like it was straight out of the camera when I was done with it. I learned, through much experimentation, practice and errors, that there was only a limited number of things I could do with these photos, and only so far I could go in improving them. I’ve also learned to let the client know this so they didn’t have the “brand new shiny photo” expectations.

The example used in this article was brought to me by a client. It was copied from a newspaper and then taken to a chain store “restoration service”, like CVS. All they could do was to turn it into a nifty example of a halftone pattern. I would have liked to have had the original newspaper photo, or at least the original copy, but, unfortunately, that option was not available to me. This is an extreme case, but even it can be improved a little.

Example #3

The third example was brought to me by a client. The photo was from an obituary in the paper and was the only photo of this persons mother. They had originally taken the photo to a chain-store to have it “restored”, just proving my point when I say you get what you pay for. The original newspaper clipping had since been lost. So this is what I had to work with. This one will take a few extra steps to get a decent result.

Open the scanned document in Photoshop/Elements/Gimp/Whatever (PEGW). Duplicate the Background layer (Cmd/Ctrl+J). This is a very strong pattern, so we’re going to do a Gaussian Blur. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and move the sliders until the pattern blurs but the detail in the picture is still visible. I have the Radius set at 5.7 pixels. Click OK.

Duplicate the layer and go to Filter > Other >High Pass. For this example, I used a Radius of 31.7 pixels. You, of course, can, and should, experiment to see if another setting would work better for you. Click OK.

For this example, I used a Layer Blend Mode setting of Overlay, but I lowered the Opacity to 50%.

Now we’re going to mix it up, some. Make a copy of all the previous layers (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Alt +E). Go to Filter > Blur > Surface Blur. Yes, in a totally radical move, we’re putting a second blur filter on this! Who said restoration wasn’t exciting?! Set the Radius to 5 pixels and the Threshold to 35 levels.

Now for the really crazy part! Go to Filter > Other > High Pass and pop this puppy with a Radius of 13.0 pixels.

Duplicate all the layers, again (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E), and add a layer mask. With the opposite color of the mask, in this case, black, use the brush tool to “paint out” the areas you want a little sharper.

Now, duplicate all the layers, one more time (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E). Set the layer blend mode to Vivid Light. This will make the photo much too sharp and pronounced, so take the opacity way down to around 25%.

While not being anywhere near a clear, sharp photo, all this work does result in a substantially better photo. The client, who had no other photo of his mother, was very pleased with the result!