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


scaled down original

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: