Derek, a friend of mine and reader of ilikecameras, visited the Greek Isles recently and came back with his first few rolls of film from his new film-SLR. Unfortunately transferring the frames to digital has proved frustrating and ultimately disappointing. Firstly the photo-lab did a poor job, even going so far wrong as to scratch some of the slides. This is all too common with you drug-store photo labs and while they may be cheap one should try not to use them for developing slide film. The second problem has been scanning the prints and getting them into a digital format. At home one would ideally have a dedicated slide-scanner or a flat-bed scanner with a slide attachment. When push comes to shove though and your mother-in-law is screaming to see holiday photos of her grandson one has to resort to flat-bed scanning the prints themselves.

So Derek scanned them in but the results are poor. Flat, lifeless colours, scratches and noise along with jagged borders and low detail. He asked me if there is anything one can do to pep the photos up. I took a look and saw that it would take some serious Photoshop skills to get much out of the photographs.

Whipping out the pen and tablet and spending 5 to 10 hours on a single photograph though would not help my friend at all. He has many photographs and all need some work after being scanned in. So I thought I would take the middle-road and stick to easy-to-use Photoshop tools (ones that other applications will have too) and, while not being able to fully-restore them, at least show Derek how to breathe some life back into your holiday shots. The dragon-in-law will hopefully be appeased.

Derek sent me three shots, one midday and two sunset. I’ll start with the midday shot and provide some detail and then go onto the two sunset shots.

The main problem in this shot is a lack of contrast leading to a washed out look as well as the dull colours of the foreground. There is also plenty of noise and some horrible vertical lines running through it.

The first step is to crop the photo so as to exclude those rough, scanned edges. You do this by selecting the Rectangular Marquee tool in your toolbox and then selecting the whole image with Ctrl-A. Now you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge the marquee away from the affected edges. You want to end up with the marquee covering all of the image you want to keep and excluding the areas you want to exclude. In Photoshop you then go to the Image menu and click the Crop item.

We then want to get some contrast into this photo to give it a bit of bite. In the Layer and then New Adjustment Layer menu select Levels. Adjustment Layers are a much better way of working with your image as they layer on top of the original image and let you tweak and, as the name suggests, adjust till you are happy. They do not affect the image’s pixels directly so you never loose your original image. The little Levels window shows a strange mountain scene with black/dark on the left and white/light on the right. In the middle is gray/mid-tone. In this photo we will leave the white slider alone as the white-buildings in the photo are already near to being blown-out. To get that contrast we want we compress the range of values by sliding the left hand slider to the right. We will leave the middle slider alone this time too.

Next we want to put some life into the grass and foliage of the foreground. Now I have been to Greece and it is not the greenest spot on earth but for this shot we will have to push it a bit to make it worth looking at. So back to the New Adjustment Layer menu you go and this time select Color Balance. I pushed the first slider towards Cyan, away from Red, the second towards Green and the third towards Yellow. Click OK and now your whole image has a greeny yellow tinge. The grass is looking better but the water is looking sick. What we have to do is tell the Color Balance layer to only apply itself to the foliage areas and not the buildings, paths, sky or water. Hit F7 to bring up the Layers palette and select the Color Balance layer. Now press B for the airbrush tool and make sure the foreground colour is black. Now you can “paint out” the water, sky and other areas. As you do this you will notice the green tinge is removed from the areas you paint but is left for the areas you leave alone. In the Layers palette you will see black stripes in the white Layer Mask. These black areas correspond to where you painted. If you make a mistake just switch the airbrush’s foreground colour to white and re-paint. This will re-apply the Color Balance layer in those spots.

For me it was not quite green enough so I applied one last colour layer through the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer. I pulled the Hue slider a bit to the right, upped the Saturation slightly and slid the Lightness slider a bit right. Now the previously yellowy green has become a fresher green.

I was reasonably happy with the colours at this stage. Pushing it much further would have resulted in more noise and quality degradation in the image. Remember there is only so much data in an image and every time you tweak and prod with Photoshop you push the limits of that data. Too much and glaring problems such as banding appear.

Next up I tried to get some detail out of the blown-out white buildings. To keep it simple I chose the Burn tool in the toolbox and set it to Midtones and 50%. Brush carefully over the white areas, including the darker spots but not the surrounding sea and foliage, and you will see the whites darken and the darker spots show up a bit more detail. It is not dramatic but every bit helps.

There are various spots and blemishes on the photograph especially in the sky area. Using the Spot Healing Brush tool click on these blemishes to remove them. Adjust the size of the brush to just cover the blemish rather than being too small or too big. Do this step before you do any noise removal or blurring as blurring especially will just smudge the blemishes into your image.

Now we want to tackle the noise. Sadly the noise removal tools found in most image editors are not very good. Ideally one should use a separate tool such as Noise Ninja. But we can take a small step to reducing the perceived noise in this image. Firstly forget about the noise in the detailed areas such as the foreground or sea. It will take hours to make the smallest reduction. Let us focus instead on the sky which is where the most visible noise is. We are going to directly adjust the pixels in the original image here so have a backup. Select the background or base layer which contains your image. Then marquee just the sky area, excluding the clouds and horizon, and make sure your marquee is feathered to one pixel. The feather will make for a smoother transition at the edges of your marquee. Using the Reduce Noise option in the Noise and Filter menus push the strength up to 10, the Preserve Details down to about 20% and the Sharpen Details down to 8%. There is not much detail in the sky that the noise filter can harm.

You will see the noise is only slightly reduced. Now select the Blur tool in your toolbox and pump it up to 100% and a broad brush. Paint all over the sky area of your image avoiding any major detail such as the clouds or horizon. You will see the noise diminish somewhat. Effectively we are throwing away detail, mainly noise in this case, for a smoother look which adds to the perceived quality of the overall photo. Computers just are not that good at figuring out what is your girlfriend’s nose and what is noise.

And there you are. It won’t win any awards and there are still problems with the photo but it has some life to it and should easily slot into your mother-in-law’s photo album.

The next two photos I will only briefly go over.

Here we have a sunset but the colours are muted from scanning and there is little contrast. A Levels Adjustment Layer with both the left and right sliders being moved helped with the contrast. The middle slider was also adjusted to bump the overall brightness of the image up. I then added some magenta, red and blue colouring through the Color Balance Adjustment Layer. Finally there was a bit of what must have been the boat the photo was taken from in the bottom left corner. It was out of place so a dab of the Spot Healing Brush and it was gone. Without Noise Ninja or a similar tool the noise was not worth tackling in this shot. For those interested the extra noise was a result of the dim lighting conditions and a smidge too fast exposure, maybe 1/3 stop too little. The film simply did not have enough time to respond properly and this lack of light can result in noise (actually called grain when it comes to film.) The end result is a more colourful sunset with added contrast.

The next photo was nearly beyond saving. In fact I decided that trying to restore some colour and brightness to the shot would simply result in a noisy mess. This is when you get creative and paint over problems with fun and dramatic effects. Black and white for a sunset shot may sound strange but the results can be lovely, something your friends may not have seen much of. In this photo I used the Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer to convert the photo to B&W. I put 100% into the Red channel and left the blue and green channels at 0%. This can loose some data but the use of only red makes for a dramatic effect. The resulting image though was a touch too dark and still not very contrasty so I applied some levels compressing the range quite a bit.

And that is a wrap. Three flat-bed scanner afflicted photos have had some of their original glory restored and at the very least you can now show them to friends without worrying. As I said before if you had the time, many hours, and the skills, months of learning, plus some extra tools you could do quite a bit better than this. Hopefully though I have given you some knowledge you can apply to your holiday shots that need a bit of life.