In Aperture, is there any way to remove the speckled effect from scanned early matt prints?

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In Aperture, is there any way to remove the speckled effect from scanned early matt prints?

I have a number of photos from the 1960s and 70s, the surface of which is covered with a matt effect. I suppose this was designed to stop fingerprints, but when scanned it shows up as a fine network of bright semicircles. The images are dreadful. My scanner has a setting that will remove this pattern, but at the cost of reducing the resolution to little more than 100 dpi, making the scans virtually unusable in anything like a Photobook. Are there any features in Aperture that might help? Or failing that, perhaps in Photoshop?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 13 in, Mid 2009, 4GB RAM

Posted on Jan 3, 2013 6:09 PM

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léonie

Level 10

194,733 points

Jan 4, 2013 9:22 AM in response to Grand Bork

What you need, is a dedicated image restauration filter that recognized the regular frequency pattern superimposed onto the prints. You can do this in advanced Image processing packages that let you compute the fourier transform of the image and then suppress or attanuate the frequency bands of the artefact with a band-stop filter.

But neither Aperture nor PhotoShop have this kind of filter. In Aperture and Photoshop you can only soften the effect by blurring and then exporting a smaller version of the image.

The algorithm that your scanner uses is probably the best that can be done, even if the resolution is only 100 dpi.

Do you still have the negatives? Scanning the negatives at a high resolution may give you better results.

Regards

Léonie

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