Need tips for scanning old yearbook pictures

[ridon127]

I am scannning in pictures from high school yearbooks. they are quite pixelated. any suggestions to make them look better in a slideshow?
thanks!!!

[Chuck Engels]

What resolution are you scanning them at Donna?

[ridon127]

I have tried 200, 600 and 1200. THe pictures ae form 1968-1970. They are wallet size and some are even smaller. I want them to look half way decent. I have clicked on descreen but it still isn't that great. thanks for your help!!

[Dave McElderry]

Old yearbook pictures have the same problem that newspaper photos do - they're made up of dots. The pixelation is built-in. No matter what resolution you use you'll still have it. Try looking at one of the pictures with a magnifying glass. If you can see the dots you have the answer to your question.

[Bob]

Dave is correct. Those pictures in the yearbook will be halftones. Books and magazines use a finer halftone screen than newsprint, I'm guessing yours will be something like 150 lines per inch.

I've never found the descreen setting in my scanner to be satisfactory. I can generally get better results using Photoshop to do the descreening. One of the easiest ways to descreen is by using blur. You can use gaussian blur, but I find that good old box blur often gives much better results. Start with a small radius and increase or decrease it until you reach the optimum setting. You can easily see when you start losing more than you gain. It's likely that the image will still look a little noisy. If you have a noise reduction plugin, that should help clean up the image somewhat.

Scan the image so that you get an image with pixel dimensions somewhat larger than you need. After you descreen the image, you can resample the image down to the final pixel dimensions with the "Image Size" function and that will help improve the apparent sharpness.

[Dave McElderry]

So much better said, and possible solutions too. Thanks Bob.

[momoffduty]

I ran into this same problem. If my memory is correct I used the Magazine setting in the scanner.

[Bob]

The magazine setting should be close. There is a relationship between the dot spacing and the radius of the blur you need and that varies also by the particular algorithm you use. If your source image is close to the dot spacing the scanner software is optimized to process, you can get pretty good results. My original scanner software didn't allow adjustment for the dot spacing and it appeared to be set for course newsprint. Didn't work well with magazine or book halftones at all. I'm now using Vuescan which does allow for specification of the dot spacing. But, I haven't had a need to scan any halftones using that so I can't say how well that works.

I've gotten pretty decent results using lens blur, but that is fiddly and harder to get adjusted. Box blur comes close to what I can get with lens blur without the hassle. Running through a noise reduction plugin afterwards does help clean up the image too. The image will always be softer focus than the original -- the halftone screening process reduces the resolution of the original image by at least half. So, you may want to try some mild sharpening. If you have one of those programs that attempt to sharpen the focus of blurry photos, that would probably work well also.

If there is a paper texture that needs to be removed, I run the image through a fast fourier transform (FFT) plugin. FFT is good for removing repetitive patterns. Should work with halftones somewhat. Here's a tutorial about it: http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=185. The plugin links mentioned in the tut are no longer working. I don't know if those plugins are still available. You need access to the channels to make the adjustments, so this is a full Photoshop solution -- not Photoshop elements unless you have add-ons to access the channels. Edit: found this: http://www.alexchirokov.narod.ru/archive.htm#FFT. Download the "new" version.

[ridon127]

Thanks evryonw. I only have photoshop elements 7. i will scan them in and give it a go..I don't have a real expensive scanner either. i am hoping to some day get a photo scanner or negative scanner. thanks again.

[ridon127]

Thanks for the tips everyone. they look pretty good now..

[Bob]

Glad to hear that!

For the benefit of those that come across this topic later, what method did you end up using?

[ridon127]

i used the gaussin blur and then adjusted the color--actually they are b&w. they look lots better..