Anyone give me some software pointers to clean up on old photo that has some dust marks, general dirt & light scratches, etc. ?
Trying photoshop, but its painfully slow
Use the clone stamp thing with transparency set to 30% or so - thatll cover up marks without leaving blotches.
edit: if you get stuck send it to me n Ill have a go a bit later.
thats no good... its 2700 x 3500 pixels
I had to do a similar thing for a member of my family recently.
Scanned an old pic in using a crappy £50 all in 1 scanner/fax/copier/printer.
The software was awful that came with it so I just selected highest quality scan, 2 minutes later XP had a fit and my RAM almost exploded. Turns out the scanner on it was quite good, it produced a massive 4000x8000 res file or something mental.
If you take an A4 300*300dpi scan it quickly gets to quite a size, 3008 x 1960 pixels. Many scanners are capable of doing 600*600dpi and a few of the latest 1200*1200dpi. so thats 12032*7840, or 94,330,880 pixels. Remember it may have 48 bits per pixel too, so 565,985,280 bytes for a single scan.
You dont get many of them on your hard disk.
Try a despeckle mask, some of the filters might help.
I need this in high quality, I want to send it off for a canvas print - at least 1mitre high
dont know which will look better
(http://i31.tinypic.com/i41k4m.jpg)(http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/5660/resitn4.jpg)
scaled down original
(http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/3429/resioriiq9.jpg)
The pastel will look far better.
The dust and scratch filters in Photoshop should do fine at hi res along with the clone brush/healing brush method mentioned, when you scale it down try choosing bicubic smooth as the resampling method and it should look a little softer and less marked Id imagine.
Ahh sorry I forgot youre not scaling it down, you need it high res for the canvas print dont you.
Id go with the sepia... much much nicer.
Yeah thats what I meant in my tiredness. Sepia, not pastel :whoops: