Scanned old photos have blotchy black areas

[LucyLu62]

Hello,

I'm am in the process of digitizing old family photos for my husband's family.

I'm scanning them using an Epson FF-680 WW, but I've tried another scanner and am having the same problem.

Many of the photos are showing a blochiness in the black areas of the photo. The blochiness sometimes appears on the unaltered scan but sometimes only appears after I pull the image into Photoshop and correct for white balance and exposure.

I'm scanning the images as JPEGs at 300 dpi.

You can see the problem in the photo below. It's like the parts of the black areas are turning blue and green.

I don't even know what to call this problem, so my google searches have been fruitless.

Does anyone know what this is, why it is happening, what I can do to correct it?

Any info would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Mary

[Leslie Moak Murray]

You can try adjusting with Levele & Curves (Image>Adjustments>Levels Curves), but often with this situation the pixels just aren't there. Depending on the sie of the affected area, I've sometimes been able to overcome this using the Content Aware fill. There's also the Clone Stamp Tool, but you have to be careful to vary the size to avoid having it look like a pattern.

[LucyLu62]

Thank you so much for your response. I'll try using Levels & Curves.

So the issue is that these areas are so underexposed that there isn't enough data to work with? That would make sense. These are mostly bad images.

Thank you again for the response.

[D Fosse]

It looks to me like the damage is done earlier. At some point this has been processed at low bit depth and low resolution, and apparently some channel clipping. In other words, it's been very carelessly treated.

This is how the blue channel looks. Not pretty. The interesting thing is that the blocks you see here is not the scanner resolution. The scanner pixels are much smaller scale and become visible if you zoom further in, but this appears to be in the image:

In other words, we're talking manual repair and rebuilding.

As a quick fix, try a hue/saturation adjustment layer set to 0 saturation, and then use Blend If to restrict the effect to the shadow areas.

[LucyLu62]

I will give that a try. Thank you so much!

[D Fosse]

Here's how:

Setting Blend If on the red channel is just because that has the best and most consistent data.

[LucyLu62]

Again, thank you so much!

[LucyLu62]

Okay, I know this is a total copout, but I wasn't getting anywhere with getting rid of the blochiness.

So, I converted the image to B&W and then used a quick action to colorize it.

It looks better. Not perfect by a long shot, but better. The colorization in some areas is off, but I cropped them out. 

Again. thank everyone for their help!

[D Fosse]

...and if you want better contrast, you can use a Channel Mixer layer to move red channel data (which is the best channel) into the green and blue channels - again with Blend If as above.

These are all quick fixes, but work rather well. Considering the quality of the originals (not good), that may be all you need.

[LucyLu62]

Thank you for that suggestion. I will try that!

I've received so much help here. Great thanks to both of you!

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

Hi @LucyLu62 Mary - are the original photos digital prints, in other words is the damage you are seeing in the original print or after you scan?

If its after you scan try changing your settings for your Epson scanner to 600 ppi and if you are using FastFoto make sure the application is not enhancing the image.

[Conrad_C]

Just for reference, these are some things that might have caused those shadows to get blotchy:

A print has less color information than its original negative/slide, which can really limit how far you can go with edits. If the film was underexposed, the shadows start out even worse. And when stored digitally, shadows contain less information than highlights.

When the image was corrected, the already limited color information in the shadows may have been stretched too far, causing the shadows to fall apart.

If the scan was saved in JPEG format before editing, the lossy compression might have broken up the shadow information even more.

For photo prints made by a drugstore or Polaroid camera (in other words, not the highest quality), this type of problem is often difficult to avoid. There might not have been much you could do about this when scanning, if the print had such a strong color cast. What a professional scanner operator would do differently is scan from the original film (if available), at a higher bit depth (such as 16 bits per channel) to preserve more of the available tonal resolution, and save in a lossless format such as TIFF or Photoshop (PSD) for the editing stage. However, the cost of the higher bit depth and lossless format is a much larger file size per image, which is a problem when scanning hundreds of family photos. (I dealt with that problem by budgeting both for very high capacity storage for scans, and for enough backup storage to keep all that safe.)

Scanning at a higher spatial resolution (for example, at 600 ppi vs 300 ppi) might not help, if this problem is more about tonal resolution per channel. This is why some of the best suggestions in this thread have to do with trying to reconstruct that weak blue channel using information from other color channels.

[Kirk35158829i0a3]

Similar issue here. The images are high resolution scan, *.TIFF, and 30-80 MB each. On several scans, the black ink caused a reflection. Is there a way to autocorrect?

[Kirk35158829i0a3]

The above are JPEG, as required to upload here to chat.

[Gixxxa75]

Sometimes you get the silver "comes out" of old prints and makes them reflective. Try rotating the print on the scanner bed, sometimes its better a certain way round. If you use a BW adjustment layer you can drag the blues and cyans to the left and make the darker, add a tint to simulate the sepia tone. You will lose the original sepia tone doing that way though.

[Barry Rudick]

This "silvering" in prints printed in real black and white photo paper is seen often here at the lab. It is caused by the leaching of latent silver in the emulsion; the silver is pushed to the surface.

Flatbed scanners have a fixed light position that is not ideal for minimizing surface textures and reflective elements.

The only way I have been able to greatly minimize this effect is by photographing the print with cross polarized lighting.

That is, polarizing the lights and lens in proper orientation to reduce the reflections from the silver.