How to make old black and white photos look great in Affinity Photo?

[AntiqueFlaneur]

Hi. 

I'm fairly new to image editing. 

I've recently received high resolution scans of an old old-of-print book that is now in the public domain. I'd like to make it and its black-and-white photos available to the public. 

I am not super experienced with photo editing, but am keen to learn. 

I need to crop off the parts of the page that are around the photos and then do my best to enhance the scans to make them look great. Can anyone suggest a guide/tutorial for doing this kind of work in Affinity Photo? I think I can probably figure out the cropping part fairly easily, but I particularly need to know the best tools for improving the black-and-white photos. 

Any advice welcome. 

Thanks!

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums.
You will probably get good advice if you tell us what kind of "improvements" you want to make to the pictures.
Since you haven't given us any examples we can't know what state the pictures are in and, thus, can't give any specific information.

[John Rostron]

One problem that you might have is if your images are half-tone, that is they are made of lots of different-sized dots on a grid. One way to fix these is to apply a Fast Fourier Transform  or FFT DeNoise Filter (Filters > Noise > FFT DeNoise). It is a bit fiddly, but once you have practised, it becomes fairly straightforward. See this tutorial and this thread. Note that the tutorial is an old one (and therefore deprecated), but I cannot find a more up-to-date one.

John

 

[AntiqueFlaneur]

5 hours ago, GarryP said:

Welcome to the forums.
You will probably get good advice if you tell us what kind of "improvements" you want to make to the pictures.
Since you haven't given us any examples we can't know what state the pictures are in and, thus, can't give any specific information.

Hi! Thanks so much for your response. 

I'm attaching three scans to give you an idea of the type of photos I'll be working with on this project. One is an agricultural field, another is a portrait, and a third is a group portrait.

Basically I want to photos to stand out and be as clear as I can make them. I'm looking for suggestions for which tools/settings/filters I should be experimenting with to make   and/or what tutorials I should watch to make that happen. I'm afraid I don't have enough of an eye/the technical vocab to describe in more detail what specific effect I'm looking for, so I'm hoping someone can give me some ideas. 

Thanks!

farmersoffortyce00kinguoft_orig_0008.jp2 farmersoffortyce00kinguoft_orig_0034.jp2 farmersoffortyce00kinguoft_orig_0439.jp2

[AntiqueFlaneur]

4 hours ago, John Rostron said:

One problem that you might have is if your images are half-tone, that is they are made of lots of different-sized dots on a grid. One way to fix these is to apply a Fast Fourier Transform  or FFT DeNoise Filter (Filters > Noise > FFT DeNoise). It is a bit fiddly, but once you have practised, it becomes fairly straightforward. See this tutorial and this thread. Note that the tutorial is an old one (and therefore deprecated), but I cannot find a more up-to-date one.

John

 

That's a really cool tool! My photo did not really seem to have a lot of noise to remove, and when I did there wasn't much of a noticeable difference. But that's a really cool option to keep in mind for future use. 

[IanSG]

2 hours ago, AntiqueFlaneur said:

That's a really cool tool! My photo did not really seem to have a lot of noise to remove, and when I did there wasn't much of a noticeable difference. But that's a really cool option to keep in mind for future use. 

Part of the problem is that if you don't delete it early on, further processing might make it more noticeable.  Just applying the FFT noise reduction and then a simple levels adjustment gives you a good basis for making more subtle / specific adjustments later on.  

[Andy05]

2 hours ago, IanSG said:

Part of the problem is that if you don't delete it early on, further processing might make it more noticeable.  Just applying the FFT noise reduction and then a simple levels adjustment gives you a good basis for making more subtle / specific adjustments later on.  

On top of that, half tone images always involve the risk of creating moiré patterns when scanned/printed.