Sharpening old Photo's

sepulchre

sepulchre

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Name
Rich
Edit My Images
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I've been asked by my parents to fix and enlarge some 45 year old colour photos they have from their wedding which are small 8cm x 8cm and very soft. I've finished the easy stuff like producing a high res scan and the dust and scratch removal but now I need to sharpen them.

As I've always found sharpening something of black art and can someone give me a pointer on how I should go about this.

Cheers

Rich
 
What software do you use Rich? If it's photoshop, then the Unsharp Mask (Filter, Sharpen, Unsharp mask) is by far the best. Subtle adjustments are the key.

Can you post one so we can try it out?
 
Rich

The problem with working on prints is they are effectively very low resolution, so you've got to be careful as to how much sharpening you apply. As suggested un sharp mask is probably the best. be careful as to much is often worse than to little.
 
High Pass Filtering method is better than Unsharp Mask by miles, especially for this sort of thing.
 
Thanks for the replies and apologies for not posting back quicker!

I'll post an image later today when I'm back at home and try the two methods mentioned above :)
 
Unsharpened
wedding1croppedjx8.jpg


Sharpened
wedding1croppedjx8_.jpg


Best I can do with CS1 (which is what I have access to at work at the moment). I could get it slightly better with CS2 or 3 (using smart sharpen).

I don't think that you will be able to significantly improve on this without adding more noise/artifacts but I hope I'm proved wrong :)

Smart Sharpen, carefully selected sharpening or third party shaprning software might reduce some of the extra noise and improve the image slightly and saving the jpeg on max quality will also help.

If you want to see how I did the sharpening look here
 
I love old photos. :)

That's not a bad job you've done there Mohain.
 
Cheers Mohain, that looks far better! I think I'll set up an action the same as you suggest in your post as it appears to do a very good job.

Thanks again :)
 
wedding1croppedjx8A.jpg


Used CS3 and the RAW option to get at the ACR sharpening controls. Added a bit of clarity to help
 
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