I have several hundred World War One era photographs I am working with that my grandfather took during his service with the Army Medical Corps. I have no negatives so I am working with nearly 100 year old B&W prints. I have scanned all of these but my scans have problems, one major is discussed here with the hope of getting some suggestions.
Many of these prints have undergone “silver creep” where the silver particles have migrated through the emulsion. Of course, these places have lost at least some of the detail that was there. When looking at the prints, these areas appear dark but if held at the right angle light will reflect off of them and they appear bright. When scanned these areas mostly appear white and are annoying to look and detract the eye away from what detail remains. My goal for this post is to ask for ideas on how to darken these light areas so they are less distractive. I know there is no hope of recovering detail but if these light areas could be darkened I think it would greatly improve the view. The example I hope to attach shows the problem quite well. Around the top and right side in particular you should see the problem. When the photo is zoomed in on these areas you can actually see what almost look like bubbles or clumps of silver. Here is my current thinking as to one approach to darken these areas. A year or so ago I achieved partial success but my notes were one of the things that I could not recover after a hard disk crash. Also, my memory is shot so I am starting from scratch. I am asking for help on what steps to take to achieve the following again. 1 – At one point I was able to get most of the bright spots isolated and on a separate layer. I had just the spots isolated but can’t recall how. I think I might have been messing with luminosity and I think had used an add-in but no clue now. 2 – My plan was to then turn the separated spots dark instead of light. I was then going to work with layers, put the spot layer underneath and adjust transparency of the upper layer to try to blend them together. Is this a reasonable idea? I have a lot of learning to do so as much detail as possible on suggested processes will be appreciated. I will also have to learn how to handle transparency layers for step 2 but I think I can figure that out without too much trouble. Again, any thoughts about this process overall will be greatly appreciated. Will my thoughts work? Is there a much better way? Any suggestions on add-ins to try, etc. You can get a little better feel for the overall project and see some additional photographs at any of the below sites. Thank you very much for any help!!! Paul Hurm [email protected] http://typicalfrenchkiddies.tumblr.com/ https://www.facebook.com/TypicalFrenchKiddies http://www.typicalfrenchkiddies.com/ No photos on this site but the Introduction may be of interest. Attachments: * http://www.gimpusers.com/system/attachments/431/original/p48_TEST_GRAY.tif -- paulhurm (via www.gimpusers.com/forums) _______________________________________________ gimp-user-list mailing list List address: [email protected] List membership: https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user-list List archives: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-user-list
