Is there any way to retouch this type of photo

[jamesarm97]

This photo was a scan of a bad photo, then I think they said they printed it and scanned it again. It has pretty bad lines on it, maybe from a bad print before the second scan. The person that asked if this can be retouched does not have access to the original. Is there any way to fix it? It looks like the pattern is consistent. I was thinking possibly isolating the bad pixels / lines and making a mask of some sort to use to subtract or something. Can get rid of the lines using noise / medium but that makes the whole image blurry. If we can use that to get what might be in place of the noise then subtract the noise on the original to make it transparent and show through the de-noised burry copy below would that work?

- James

 

[r.j.s]

You might be able to, but it will be very time consuming. Those lines will not be easy to remove, but it should be possible.

 

[mperkins37]

Can you get the first scan? If so that would obviously be a better point to start.
If not it would probably be prohibitive to try & work this one.

 

[oli2140]

[deleted]

 

[efxgraphx]

It'll be quite hard to do well, I played around a bit and could only get these two images.

I ended up just redrawing parts of the image (I only did the trousers and the background) Second image i blurred a bit which helped too.

Click on the images to enlarge

I didnt do any retouching yet, but ran it thru multiple filters, trial and error and worked out a few issues. The lines are there, just a tad more faint.... i think I can get rid of those then come back and sharpen it to get the detail... ill work on it some more tomorrow to see if i can tweak it more. Here is what i have so far.....

 

[mickbab]

You could create a light striped layer over the top which would make the dark stripes lighter, so it would all be lighter (or dark stripes to make it all darker), to get rid of the dark-light-dark-light stripes. Do you know what I mean? I don't know much about Photoshopping etc so just an idea.

 

[covisio]

You could create a light striped layer over the top which would make the dark stripes lighter, so it would all be lighter (or dark stripes to make it all darker), to get rid of the dark-light-dark-light stripes. Do you know what I mean? I don't know much about Photoshopping etc so just an idea.

Correct, that is (sort of) what you need to do. Create a new channel with alternating black and white lines, in the exact same position as the lines in the image. Then use the blur tool to soften them to the right degree. Then create a levels or curves adjustment layer using this new channel as its mask.

 

[PixelFactory]

Here is the best I could do without spending a day or two on it.

 

[jamesarm97]

That looks pretty good, probably the best we can get without doing some fancy stuff. I was thinking the same thing along the lines as one of the previous posters. If there was some way to isolate the lines into a channel, then duplicate the original image and do a denoise / median to kind of come up with what colors would be in place of the lines, then subtract the lines using the channel mask to reveal the colors from the layer below. I am just trying to figure a way to get the pattern only into a channel using some filters or something now.