photo restoration-any suggestions

[springyzone]

I'd be grateful for any advice from anyone who knows something about photography, or printing for that matter.

I am in the process of trying to make a photobook/book. Nothing commercial of course, just a book for the family. My father wrote up about 57 pages about his early life and I want to transfer that into a book format and include a lot of photos from his early years. He's dead now so it would be nice to pass something along to his grandchildren and now the great grandchildren.

My problem is a lot of the old photos are very faded now and although i have scanned them and tried 'auto enhance' it doesn't always do the job.

I looked up photo places that do enhancement but basically they were talking eg $150 a photo. I have dozens of little black & white photos, some of them from the war, some even of the signing of the peace with Japan, and I would like to restore them a bit before making the book. But it looks like I will need to teach myself how to do it as it is too dear to get it done.

Can anyone suggest some good programs for enhancing old photos? Is photoshop the way to go or are there better programs for what I want?

Also I am looking at Blurb Booksmart program to make the book. Does anyone have experience with this program or can they recommend any alternative? I need something that has layouts for text as well as photos, that is my main problem.

[kopenhagen5]

If not using Photoshop, CorelDRAW was recommended to me many years ago.

I think they also have a free trial version.

[davidc4430]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiJ_YcNChKw

[springyzone]

Thanks David. I'll have a look.

[baybizz]

@ springyzone: I use two excellent free applications to enhance pictures, often taken from fuzzy videos. They are Irfanview and Gimp. Gimp is often called the free version of Photoshop. I often use them to create artistic and impressionistic versions of quite bland original pics taken from videos. Obviously you would not need to go this far to imporove your pics, but it shows what can be achieved from quite dull ordinary originals. Here's a couple of examples which I made a few days ago:

~

When enhancing old photos the controls you will probably find most useful are:

Sharpen

Unsharpen (despite the name, actually an alternative sharpen effect which emphasises the edges between various objects in the pic) 

Gamma (lighten/darken)

Contrast

Saturation

Clone tool (for removing creases and marks)

Re-size

If you want to add some colour to an old black and white pic, try the Colors/Color Balance adjustment in Gimp. In Gimp you can select out various sections of the pic to insert some colour into them - see the first example above.

Irfanview:

http://www.irfanview.com

The Gimp:

https://www.gimp.org

[lyndal1838]

Springy you could have a look at lulu.com.....they are a small self publishing company where the author controls the whole process.

I first heard about it when I was given a self published family history book to read.

It was a really professional looking little book.

[springyzone]

Thanks. You have done some amazing work there!!

And Lyndal, I will look into that company.

Plus have a look at corel.

A friend also told me that she uses Photoscape, which is a free download.

It just seemed a shame to pay for a book to be made when so many of the photos are a bit faded.

Unfortunately I am not too talented with photos, computers or scanners either so I'm on  alearning curve here.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

[baybizz]

springy: whatever software you eventually choose to use, remember that there are plenty of free tutorials on YouTube for most of them:

Irfanview tutorials

Gimp tutorials

Photoscape tutorials

[ca04]

Most photo quality scanners alow you to manipulate the settings in the driver settings to counter fade,tone, colour during the scaning and any photo fixing software will have the tools to remove scratches cracks ect in the result.