Removing Halftone from Scanned Newspaper Photos
My dad recently sent me a scanned photo from an old newspaper that he is using in a historical video he is working on. One of the main issues you face when working with projects of this nature is quality images. Sometimes, you have actual photos, which usually contain a workable amount of visual data to work with. Sometimes you’re on the other end of the spectrum with photocopies of old newspapers.
For this tutorial we’re looking at a pretty typical source image, a scan of a newspaper photo, and how to remove the halftone dot pattern caused by printing.
Bringing Some Work Home
As some of you may know, by day I am a web designer for a sporting goods company putting together marketing emails, maintaining the look and feel of the website, and keeping an eye on the SEO initiatives we have going.
Coming up later this week we are launching a new sport line. We are mainly a wrestling and volleyball supply retailer, with some running, but we’re jumping into the realm of field sports (lacrosse, field hockey, and soccer) and it has been my job to compile product images, build pages and make sure the whole section is ready to go.
Software Review: Topaz DeNoise
I sat down last night to see if Topaz DeNoise was all it’s cracked up to be. No matter how hard you try, every so often you will find yourself in a situation where your settings were off or the light changed or you’re shooting at night and your image has a lot of noise. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the most technical photographer out there when it comes to making sure I have everything set properly in-camera. So this happens to me every so often.
To show an example of the kind of noise that can arise when your settings are a little off, here’s a closeup detail of shot I took over the summer with Kim and I took off for Niagara Falls for a spontaneous weekend away. It was a little dark and when I increased the exposure in post, the noise really came out.
As you can see, it’s not too bad, but is noticeable and it’s got to go. I usually do some noise reduction in Lightroom or ACR but it’s not quite right. So, I brought the image into Photoshop CS4 as a Smart Object and applied the Topaz DeNoise plugin to it so it would work as a Smart Filter. I used one of the presets and played with the sliders only a little bit here and there and the results were fantastic:
I was expecting to lose detail as though I used a surface blur but Topaz DeNoise targeted only the noise within the image and left the edges and details alone. This wasn’t necessarily a “throw away” shot before, but it’s definitely a keeper now. With just a few clicks I was saved from having to make some tough choices about sacrificing detail to lose the noise.
There’s really not much else to say about it, other than Topaz DeNoise simply does what it’s supposed to. It has all of the pros and cons I mentioned in my post about Topaz Adjust and the price ($79.99) is definitely with reach and I’d say is worth it for the job that it does fixing a tough problem.
I couldn’t just leave the photo at that, I had to keep playing around with Adjust to make the shot even better. Here’s the original:
And here is the final image. All I did was adjust the exposure and white balance in ACR, apply Topaz DeNoise, make a few enhancements based on a preset in Topaz Adjust, and add a touch of lens vignetting:
Workflow Friday
For this edition of my Photoshop Workflow series, I thought I would walk you through the steps to add a nice shadow/reflection to a product shot. It’s something that I’ve done a number of times at work for both our website graphics and marketing email campaigns. Because of time, I’ll only have the final image but hopefully the description will sufice.
- Isolate your product from its background and place it in a new document. If you’ve placed it in the new document it should be a Smart Object already, if you just dragged it over, convert it to a smart object for the added flexibility and preservation of the image. In this instance, we’re looking at a new Nfinity Volleyball Shoe that we’re selling so I had both the standard shot as well as the shot of the outsole to work with, which will make the reflection more believeable later on.
- If you are going to use the same image of the product as the reflection, duplicate the layer using Cmd/Ctrl+J. Select the version that is lower in the layer stack and go to Free Transform (Cmd/Ctr+T) and flip it vertically and align shift it down so that it lines up below the primary “right-side-up” version of the image.
- Lower the opacity of the upside-down image to around 40%. Add a layer mask to this same layer and with your linear gradient set to “Black to White” grag from the bottom edge of the product to where it meets the right-side-up version. If you like, you can also add a slight Gaussian Blur to it as well.
- To see the effect, using the Rectangle Tool, create a black box below both layers so that the top edge of the box falls part of the way up the original version of the product – be sure to make it far enough up so it looks like the object is sitting on a surface but not too high that the edge is not above the object.
- At this stage we’re going to add a little more flair to it to really make it stand out. On a new layer above the reflection and below the object, use the Eliptical Marquee Tool – or the Elipse Tool – to create an oval around the base of the product and fill it with white. Convert it to a Smart Object and blur it quite a bit to make it look like a spotlight is shining on the product. And reduce the opacity of this layer to about 80% or so – to your taste.
- Duplicate the layer you just created and reduce the size a little, while holding down Option/Alt+Shift to create a hot spot in the middle of the spotlight.
- Duplicate the product shot one more time and select the copy that is directly above the spotlight layers. Add a black Color Overlay Layer Effect to this layer.
- Go into Free Transform and grab the middle handle on the top of the product shot and drag down so it shows up beneath the object – you may need to do some warping/skewing/etc. to get it to fall properly and look right.
- Add about a 4px Gaussian Blur to the shadow layer.
- Add a Layer Mask to the shadow layer and using the edge of a fairly large, soft-edged brush paint with black a couple of times along the edges of the shadow so it will appear that the shadow falls off a little, in a more realistic way.
And the finall shot will look something like this (with a few added touches):
Give it a try and if you come up with anything cool, send it along and I’ll post it here on the blog!
