Thanks, Zaph.
Sometimes you can get rid of the lines from newspaper images by running them through a Fast Fourier Tranform (FFT) filter. There’s one in the free app, “Image J”. Fortunately in this case it worked well. (I’ve found that, for me, it works about half the time. I couldn’t get it to help much on Keith’s other picture.)
So, I did an initial clean-up with Photoshop Elements, my primary photo restoring app. Then I did the FFT.
Next I put the resulting image through Topaz’s Photo AI. I tried a couple of different processes. First I used “Super Focus” which did a reasonable job, but in smoothing the image it destroyed some detail I wanted to keep. I saved that image, though, and then tried again with the Topaz app's “DeNoise” and “Sharpen” filters at varying settings. That did a better job of keeping detail—but didn’t smooth it enough.
I went back to PSE and used layers and masks, blending the 3 images (FFT and the 2 Topaz ones) trying to get the best mix I could.
Finally I did some more tidying up with PSE's manual tools.
I tried a similar sort of process with Keith’s other picture but it didn't work as well. Hopefully someone else will have a go at it, or I’ll have another go later.
But, basically that’s it: playing around, trial and error, with the different apps, trying for the best compromise I could get. There's a fair bit of manual work, trying to manipulate the abilities of the different apps.
Hope this makes sense.
Peter
