Being totally new to GIMP, I would appreciate some help to get me started in enhancing old black and white pictures - in easy language please! I am scanning old prints using Google Photoscan, which gives good results, but want to try and enhance the pictures before putting them on cloud!
Any assitance would be really appreciated.
Welcome @Varaloba_One
Looking at your low resolution jpg (2.4 Mpixels), I can observe a lot of defects: people in foreground are blurry, a lot of artifacts, glare.
The First step is to check if it is the same quality as your original. What is lost in the scanning process will be very difficult if not impossible to recover.
-
If your original is of better quality than the scan, I would advise taking raw photo with a photo camera using some kind of stand. Personally I put the photo on a neutral gray cardboard on the floor, to flatten the photo I put a piece of non-reflecting (and expensive) glass on it, and use camera on tripod. Take care of light.
Some people here use more sophisticated stands.
Camera with 20/24MP is a minimum. Prime lens is a must. To easily frame the photo, I use a macro zoom, but it is not as good.
Then use a raw processing SW -
if your original is the same quality as your jpeg, I don’t know what to do to restore the photo. I let some more proficient people answer.
Hope this help.
I agree there’s not enough usable data in this image to enhance it in a meaningful way.
The only possible works on this are artistic repainting or maybe AI trickery to enhance faces ? But I’m not really competent in either of those areas.
Hi @Varaloba_One and welcome!
I have a feeling that the photo was not totally flat against the scanner platen?
Did you scan it from an album page? Or perhaps with the photo still behind glass
in a frame of its own? Where does that oblique line/edge at right come from?
Apart from that: what do you mean by “enhancing”? Mending the missing spots?
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
Google Photoscan uses a mobile phone camera.
To achieve good results it is best to use a flatbed scanner at a suitably high resolution setting.
The better the resolution of the original scan, the easier it is to restore a photo.
david.