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Old Newspaper Pictures


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Just wondering how anybody out there has dealt with old newspaper pictures in a LO? I have a picture of my mother and myself vintage mid '50s. It's in pretty good shape and I don't mind the yellowish tint at all but is there any way to make the picture clearer or alternatively sort of balance out the lack of clarity with design factors. When I blow it up it's got lots of little dots. Are these pixels or are pixels just functions of a digital photo? Interested in any input, technical or arty or some combination thereof

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The dots are the printing process that is used for newspapers. There's not much you can do about them. You can try using the Gaussian blur filter to soften the scanned photo a bit. It's not sharpening, but if you sharpen, you'll just make the halftone dots more prominent. I would say to keep the photo not too large on the layout to minimize the dot pattern.

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The dots are the printing process that is used for newspapers. There's not much you can do about them. You can try using the Gaussian blur filter to soften the scanned photo a bit. It's not sharpening, but if you sharpen, you'll just make the halftone dots more prominent. I would say to keep the photo not too large on the layout to minimize the dot pattern.

Kind of what I thought but I'll play with the Gaussian blur. Thx!

Interesting with the dot thing. I wonder can you use halftones to make something look like a newspaper photo?

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After Hurricane Katrina, I salvaged some very old newspaper pictures from my Dad’s high school football scrapbook that sat in flood waters for a week. I scanned them and then used the Dust and Scratches filter to lightly soften them. They look really nice in the layouts. In some of the pictures I had to adjust things like contrast or brightness, depending on how damaged they were. Just play with the different filters until you get the look you want. Good luck.

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Try using the descreen option. That is supposed to help when scanning magazine and newspaper clippings.

Where is that? Forgot to mention I'm using PSE 6 on a Mac.

 

Descreen is a setting you choose on your scanner before you scan. There is an Adobe plug-in for Photoshop (CS4 optional plug-ins) that will do it, but I have never used it and it most likely won't work with PSE.

There are a few tutorials online for how to descreen in PSE. They have you scan at a 150 -200% higher resolution than you need. Then use Filter > Noise > Median and adjust the radius. Re-size the image to the size you really need, then use Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask. They suggest a slight Gaussian blur if the pattern is still bothersome after all that.

 

Hope that helps.

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