Grainy Photo

[Niki Burony]

I have some photos which are about 40 years old. They were taken with color 35 mm film available in that day. I have the negatives, and took them to Walmart and had them transfered to CD, and now I have loaded them onto my computer for editing and creating a photo book.

Most of the color photos are grainy. Funny, the black and white photos from the same time look pretty good, but the color photos all look grainy or pixelated. I am new to Photoshop Elements, and wondering if some one would have some specific adjustments to color/sharpening, etc or even any of the filters you may suggest to improve the look of the photos.

So far I've been just guessing, but nothing looks quite right.

[Steve Grisetti]

What resolution are the photos?

In Photo Elements go to Image/Resize/Image Size and post the Pixel Dimensions.

Can you post a sample to this forum? It could be that these photos were scanned in low resolution and that, when you display them on your very high resolution computer monitor, they just look "grainy".

[Niki Burony]

The image looks to be 1818x1228, it references 6x4 inches in size, and 300 pixels.

I'm not sure how to post the image to the forum - help?

[Steve Grisetti]

Well, if your photos are that high resolution, then resolution is not the problem.

But I'm still not sure what you mean by "grainy."

Can you post at 640x480 pixel sample?

To do so, look below the box where you type your reply for the the Upload attachment tab.

[Niki Burony]

Ok, lets try this

Its a picture of my mom and dad when they were young - aren't the beautiful??

Maybe you understand photo size better, but when I converted the size to 640x480, it seems like the picture even looked better on the screen already. Take a look, and let me know what you think.

[Paul LS]

When you viewed the photo at the original resolution on your monitor before resizing how large was it? And how did that compare the the original size of the photo.

[Niki Burony]

The original photo on the computer before resizing was 1818x1228. It was scanned from a 35 mm film at Walmart, I'm not sure what their process is. I just resized the photo to 640x480 to attach on this forum, which actually seemed to help. The original photo was printed on 4x6, but like I said, this was done from the negative itself.

[Gooder]

I am new to Photoshop Elements, and wondering if some one would have some specific adjustments to color/sharpening, etc or even any of the filters you may suggest to improve the look of the photos.

Hello Niki,

There is a nice guy called Stuart Little and he has a vast knowledge of Photoshop and all things photo related. What he offers is not for Photoshop Elements but he does have a forum (You will have to register first but thst is free). You could try reaching him in the forum and he might be able to help you!

I would certainly give him a try and see what he comes back with!
I have just started using Photoshop CS and the training he gave was excellent and well worth every penny, dollar, kronor, spent!

http://littlephotoshopforum.com/

I'm sure you will get great advice from the muvipix team and members but it's worth a try!

Hope it helps!
Lee

[Paul LS]

What I meant was the monitor I am using at the moment is set to a resolution of 1024x768. So an 1818x1218 resolution photo would be almost 4x (area wise) the size of my screen. The actual photo was probably 6x4 or less originally, when blown up to the size of the screen it will look grainy.

[Bob]

Niki,

1818x1228 isn't a particularly high resolution for a scanned 35mm negative, they can be scanned at quite a bit higher resolution. However, it may be entirely high enough depending on what you want to do with them. It's certainly high enough for video and web page uses if you don't intend to crop much. But, it may be a bit low for making top quality prints if you want large size prints.

Color negative dyes from the 1960's were more clumpy than the transparency films, but I'd like to see an original sized scan before saying anything. Would you repost the photo of your parents. I don't need the entire photo, just a crop of the original centered on your parents would be fine. It's important that you don't resize it. Resizing throws away the original pixels in the image and recalculates new ones.

[Niki Burony]

I think, ( if I understand my setting correctly) my monitor settings are 1280x800, I'm using a laptop.

Here's a cropped part of the picture, I didn't change any resolution, I just cropped a small part.

[Steve Grisetti]

I see the graininess now, Niki. And I think I know what's going on. I think it's something called here's-why-you-shouldn't-get-your-photos-scanned-at-Walmart.

Just kidding.

Part of it has to do with the original photo, believe it or not. See, photos, especially those taken with instant, focus-free camera, generally are not as clean as they look. If you were to look at the original with an eye loop or an magnifying glass, you'd likely see a lot of that same graininess. You just don't notice it because the original photo is only 3"x5" or some such.

A good scanner (like me) would know to run a de-screener on the scan to hide a lot of that. You can fix a lot of it by running a denoiser on it. You'll find one in Photo Elements under Filter/Noise/Reduce Noise. You can also run a little Gaussian Blur on the photo. You'll find that under Filter/Blur.

But, for the most part, if you use the photo at about the size of the original, that graininess likely won't show. And, if you use it in a video slideshow (which is the equivalent of that 640x480 pixel photo you posted above, you should be just fine.)

Does that help?

By the way, if you DO plan to make a video slideshow, it's definitely to your advantage to reduce your photo size to no more than 1000x750 pixels each. It will avoid a lot of technical issues Premiere Elements has with much larger photos, in addition to speeding up the rendering process. If you go to Photo Elments, under the File menu you'll find Process Multiple Files that will do this for all of your photos at once. It will even store the reduced size photos in another location so you can keep your original photos in their original high resolution.

[Bob]

Thanks Niki,

Steve is correct. Running a denoiser (or de-screener) on the image in the scanner would help a lot. You aren't going to get that at Walmart. You can do noise reduction after the fact in your photo editor but it's best when done in the scanner. Also, because the faces are so little of the image area, it would help with this particular image to scan at a higher resolution.

The negative is clumpy. A good deal of that is the dyes that were used in those old emulsions. But, I'm also seeing pixelation caused by the scanning resolution which is making the clumpiness more noticeable and causing a loss of fine detail -- de-screening would help a lot with this. If you blow up the size of the image in your photo editor, you can see this easily in the faces. If you are going to use Walmart again, next time around, see if they offer a higher resolution scan. The film dye clumps will still be there, but the image will be smoother and you can get more effective noise reduction in your editor. You can resize the image afterwards.

As for what you can do with the images you have now, go ahead and try doing some noise reduction. There are some excellant noise reduction plugins available, they can be expensive though. Besides the noise filter Steve mentioned, you can also try some simple noise reduction techniques to see if they produce satisfactory results. There are lots of tutorials on the web.

Here are a couple of examples using elementary techniques. The photo on the left is the original. The photo in the middle was made by duplicating the image layer and appling the median filter to the duplicate layer with a setting of 2 pixels and then setting the opacity of that layer to 50%. The photo on the right was made by duplicating the image layer and applying the dust and scratches filter to the duplicate layer with a setting of 1 pixel radius and 0 threshold. Again, the opacity of the duplicate layer was set to 50%. Feel free to experiment. Different photos will work better with some techniques than others. If you feel comfortable with more advanced techniques you might want to try one of the techniques that use masks to preserve edge detail.

[Niki Burony]

Wow, thanks guys, I knew you would be a good source.
Likely, I won't be doing this at Walmart anymore, but it was the best quick source without investing in equipment.

I'll be spending some time tomorrow trying the techniques you've described.

Appreciate the help!

[ScrugneysGundogs]

Have you ever tried Neat Image? There is a freebie for photos and another one for videos. It integrates with Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements.