My wife's mother died very unfortunately when my wife was very young.

One photograph remains of her, you can see a scan of it here. My intent is to make new photographs from this original, and I need to edit it digitally to get there. Eventually I hope to have digital negatives done and platinum prints, mainly for their longevity.

As far as I know it's a copy of a print. If you examine it, as I have, there are screenprinting looking anomalies in the print. Now to my question, is there software, or does Photoshop have a feature, that can recognize a pattern and remove it, much like dust/scratch software like DigitalICE?
I know it's not ideal, but I think I would have to spend years on this to clean it up otherwise. Quality is not of utmost importance, but speed is.

I've cleaned it up pretty good from fingerprints, dust, and scratches so far.

I would be extremely thankful for help with this. Please review the attachment.

- Thomas

Thomas,

If you scanning the print in either Vuescan or Lasersoft Silverfast, there should be a 'descreening' option. If so it might take care of the problem for you, without having to go into Photoshop. Hope this helps.

George

Goes to prove how much experience I have with this... I'll try that, George. Thanks!
- Thomas

OK, tried descreening. All I get is a black box after the scanning is done. I've tried all kinds of descreening options. Something is weird. I just spent five hours on this and got nowhere. Very frustrating... There must be a better way.

I'm very open to suggestion.

- Thomas

g'day Thomas

often those types of patterns don't show after saving to jpeg and or printing to inkjet, not sure how or why

Ray

Thomas,

Shot in the dark, in case you use GIMP:
there is a filter in the latest versions (2.4.x) that helps in getting rid of repeating patterns like these "screen moires".

Having said that, I'd recommend you persevere in trying to fix it at scan time. I do know that vuescan has a specific de-screening filter, if you are using that and it ain't working, try to ask Ed Hamrick for help: he's usually quite good at helping on these "weird" situations.

I'm sorry I can't offer more specific help but I stopped using the 4990 flatbed a while ago and the memory of these problems is fading fast.

Try placing the photo at an angle on the scanner glass,this sometimes works with the moire effect. You can always straighten it out later in photoshop.

I have now tried all of the de-screening filters in Epson Scan and VueScan, with better results than Silverfast.
For some reason Silverfast gave me a completely black image. Just charcoal pitch black. Weirdness.
I still have the screen marks. These will be diginegs printed on textured paper in palladium. So I don't think it'll be an issue. The original image is 3.5" x 5" and I'm keeping it to that size, but slightly larger, about 4x6. It shouldn't be too visible.

I've attached a jpeg of the last effort.

- Thomas

Looks good and you might well get away with it: blew it up and it wasn't visible until much larger in size than what you're planning to use.

If I come across some info on this subject I'll bounce it off to you, know I've seen it somewhere...