Repairing scans in Gimp?

[KD5NRH]

It has fallen to me to get a bunch of old family slides, negs, and prints scanned in, and since most of them are several decades old, there are plenty with some minor damage. I'm pretty sure I've seen some tutorials for this somewhere, but I'm having some trouble tracking them down again. At any rate, there's got to be a better way than trying to clone and heal every little bit of this stuff.

As an example of what I'm trying to fix, the orange splotches in this shot seem to be among the most common issues with slides, along with patchy fading in both slides and prints.

[LonestarMan]

Cant view image, SmugMug Gallery requires a password.

[KD5NRH]

Oops. Should be fixed now. The spots on the forehead, and left of the wrist are what I was referring to - there are several slides I haven't scanned yet that have more dramatic examples of this.

This print looks like some sort of chemical damage, but it's one I'd particularly like to save.

I guess what's needed is a way to get a precise mask of the damaged area, so that it can be adjusted independently of the rest of the photo. For one or two, that could be done by hand, but there are at least a couple hundred prints, and it would be easier to quantify slides and negatives by weight at this point. Most need some slight PP, and I'd say 5% of the slides and 10% of the prints need some degree of repairs like this, so anything that can speed up the masking process would be helpful.

[venchka]

I say, "Fuhgettaboutit!" Those things are way too large an area of the original to worry about. You won't live long enough to fix that stuff. Dust spots are one thing, trying to fix half a picture isn't worthwhile.

[kenw]

the bottomline, and expanding on Wayne's evaluation is that stuff like this is way beyond any simple fix. Each pic will have to be carefully and individually editted, unfortunately..tghere's just no shortcuts.

Simple blanket fixes (or filters) won't do them justice other than just to add some contrast or saturation back.

Crop the salavageable parts, then do what you can to what is left. And plan to spend a lot of time. the family pic looks like a typical finger print on a still-developing Polaroid. I've got a ton of those in my famly's albums......fixing the contrast and saturation is about the limit of the scope of work on that one.

photo restoration is more art than science.

[KD5NRH]

Originally Posted by kenw

Crop the salavageable parts, then do what you can to what is left. And plan to spend a lot of time. the family pic looks like a typical finger print on a still-developing Polaroid. I've got a ton of those in my famly's albums......fixing the contrast and saturation is about the limit of the scope of work on that one.

Out of curiosity, I masked off part of it and adjusted it in curves, and had a pretty good match for the undamaged area. The problem is finding a way to mask only the damage, and finding a good way to feather it in to the remainder of the photo.