Enhancing old scanned prints & negatives

[madbrain]

I have many old photos that have been scanned. Many prints have scratches of them. Many negatives have specs of dust, despite my best efforts to clean them prior to scanning.

I just started a trial of Affinity Photo 2 today. The main programs I use to manage and enhance my photos are Lightroom Classic and Topaz Photo AI, which are relatively simple to use. Neither of them can deal with specs of dust or scratches, though.

It seems like Photo 2 has the capabilities to do what's needed, but if I understand correctly, I need to use brushes and go over every single spec of dust or scratch manually with my trackball. I have some very old photos with as many as 100 specs of dust, so it is a non-starter for me. Is there a simple 1-pass way to do what I need in Affinity ?

Thanks.

 

[carl123]

Your best bet is to upload a few examples of the images you are working with to get any targeted advice 

[madbrain]

1 hour ago, carl123 said:

Your best bet is to upload a few examples of the images you are working with to get any targeted advice 

Is this really necessary ? These are private family photos I would rather not make public.

The specs of dust looks like white dots, obviously larger than a pixel. Scratches are, well, scratches.

But the point of my question is that I'm not a professional, just an amateur wanting to enhance photos. I'm looking for something that works on the entire photo, maybe with a few slider for settings, but not using any brush to manually select parts of the photos with the dust and/or scratches.

Is that something that Affinity can help with, or am I looking for another product ?

 

 

[carl123]

3 minutes ago, madbrain said:

I'm looking for something that works on the entire photo, maybe with a few slider for settings,

Try the Dust & Scratches filter under the Filters > Noise menu

[madbrain]

40 minutes ago, carl123 said:

Try the Dust & Scratches filter under the Filters > Noise menu

Thank you very much ! This filter works well on most of the small specs of dust with a 5 pixel radius on several of my images. It gets rid of almost all the dust with that setting. However, it causes blur on the rest of the image also, making it impractical to use. For scratches, it doesn't look like it's effective below 30 - 60 pixel radius, but at that point there is essentially nothing left of the photo.

 

 

 

 

[firstdefence]

You have the Heal tool and also the Inpainting tool as well as others, the heal tool will help in removing dust and the Inpainting tool will help with scratches. Take a look at this video to give you some ideas on how to use these tools.

 

[madbrain]

16 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

You have the Heal tool and also the Inpainting tool as well as others, the heal tool will help in removing dust and the Inpainting tool will help with scratches. Take a look at this video to give you some ideas on how to use these tools.

 

Thank you. This is more effort than I I am looking to expend, though. I'm simply not accurate enough with a mouse/trackball to be able to use any of the brushes in Affinity, or any other product.

I'm looking for some process where I don't have to manually select parts of the image to fix. Ideally, a 100% automated process with a slider, maybe with AI.
But if not, something that at least attempts to automatically detect those scratches / creases and prompts whether to try to remove them or not.

[carl123]

42 minutes ago, madbrain said:

However, it causes blur on the rest of the image also, making it impractical to use

It's useful on about 1 in 10 images for me and works best when the image has a central character/focus because you can always remove the blur selectively by use of the live filter and its inherent mask but even then, there will always be some manual touch up but the filter can do 90% of the work. How best and what procedure(s) to handle a particular batch of images depends on how those images are affected