Restoring a poorly printed photo

Glasya · June 19, 2020

Hi all of you wonderful people.

i have a quite unique photo of me and me sister that i would like to keep. and this print is the only copy of it that i have. its from a party like 8 years ago and i have no idea who took the photo originally.

the print itself is very bad with strong visible lines all over the image. In addition to that the colors started to fade.

i spend some time searching for techniques in Photoshop to remove those lines but i did not find anything.

does someone know who to restore an image like that? i am grateful for any help i can get.

this photo means alot to me

the image i uploaded is just a tiny crop of the full image. so you can undertand what i mean with "lines over the image"

minibois · June 19, 2020

I spent a couple minutes trying someone stuff and these edits may have improved (this section of) the image a tiny bit:

Although I am sort of worried the edits done would also harm the detail in the image.

This was edited in Gimp.

I used the 'Curves' panel to kind of bring the the different shades closer to each other, which got rid of most of the lines.

This was what I used, for reference:

Then afterwards only a hint of the lines was left.

The 'hints' were removed using the 'Hue-Saturation' panel in Gimp (probably present in other programs too, it's where you can edit the hue/saturation/lightness of colors separately).

In there, I was able to remove the last hint of the lines in the most obvious places.

Sadly though, the background does kind of get mangled by those edits, plus you are missing a lot of light/dark on the shirt too. But I think those might be the sort of editing panels you could mess around with.

Maybe you should 'cut up' the image digitally, so you can work on the background and such separately.