Removing Noise

XA
Posted By
Xaiver_Ashe
Oct 21, 2005
Views
1925
Replies
10
Status
Closed
I have a scan of an old 11×17 print that has visable print lines from the old printer. This is the last known copy of this picture and all I have to go on. I have cropped out a small example:

<http://www.forevermemorable.com/example.tif>

The only adjustments so far is adjusting the color curves during the scan. Can anyone help in cleaning up this photo? Are there any plugins or bultin filters that would work? I am mainly interested in removing the horizontal lines, then I can go in a do my usual restoration. I have Photoshop CS. Thanks.

How to Master Sharpening in Photoshop

Give your photos a professional finish with sharpening in Photoshop. Learn to enhance details, create contrast, and prepare your images for print, web, and social media.

F
Firebird
Oct 21, 2005
Hi,
Here is a 3rd party Plugin that has a Filter named "Super Smooth". Works great; (I use it everyday).
Download the 4 sets and unzip them into a Folder named Xero. Drag the Xero Folder into Photoshop Plugins Folder. It will appear as one Plugin in Photoshop Filters.

(use Edit/Fade to fine tune.)

<http://prairiepixels.com/plugins.html>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

An Action named "Glamor Blur" would be a good follow up to the "Super smooth" to restore detail and definition.

(use Edit/Fade to fine tune.)

<http://www.atncentral.com/download.htm>

Hope it helps,
Firebird
PK
Philip_Kaszerman
Oct 21, 2005
I would imagine that the best way to get rid of a line would be the clone tool. Set it to the width of the line and keep the source cursor as close as possible. You can even select the line with one of the mask tools to make life easier. Later, you may have to use either the clone tool at very high transparency, the blur brush, or whatever to blend the remnants of the line into the adjacent space.

I am not familiar with the tools suggested in the previous posts. However, I have found that Noise Ninja works like magic on random noise. It is not going to do too well on something like a line unless you want the entire picture to be super smooth.
BO
Burton_Ogden
Oct 23, 2005
Xaiver,

Can anyone help in cleaning up this photo? Are there any plugins or bult-in filters that would work? I am mainly interested in removing the horizontal lines, then I can go in a do my usual restoration.

In my opinion, the best way to remove a specific noise pattern like, for example, your horizontal skipped ink nozzle lines created by the old printer, is to use noise removal software that recognizes a non-random noise pattern and removes that specific pattern. I used the Neat Image Pro+ version 5.2 plugin for Photoshop on your posted small example, and this is the result alongside your original < http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/MaineMan/example_Neat Image.jpg>.

As you can see, Neat Image recognized what the horizontal noise pattern was, and removed just that pattern, leaving the underlying image information intact. If you were to make the mistake of treating this printer nozzle pattern as random noise, which it most definitely is not, and blurred the image to remove that "random noise", then you would very seriously degrade the image.

Although I used Neat Image for this demonstration, I believe that Noise Ninja also has similar capabilities. Both are excellent programs.

If you want to try Neat Image for yourself, you can download a demo at the Neat Image website <http://www.neatimage.com/>. If you are interested, I can provide you with the details of the settings I used in Neat Image to produce the result I have shown. Unfortunately, the demo edition is freeware that is not nearly as capable as the Pro+ edition that I use, and I am not sure all the settings I used are available in the freeware demo. ABSoft does have downloadable Neat Image documentation. Like Photoshop, Neat Image rewards you for your effort in learning the techniques of using it.

If the freeware edition isn’t capable of producing the results you need, perhaps we can find a way for you to transmit your complete image to me for processing with my Pro+ Photoshop plug-in. Also, you might want to download the Noise Ninja demo and try it, with the knowledge that capable noise removal tools can solve your problem.

I am not an expert at using Neat Image, and it is very likely that even better results could be obtained by tweaking the settings I used. I did let Neat Image automatically determine the noise pattern from the image, and then I tweaked the settings of that pattern to get a preview that I liked. I routinely use Neat Image to clean up my images using that approach. However, that’s a fairly subjective process and you might create a result more to your liking with different settings.

— Burton — (not associated with Neat Image or ABSoft or Noise Ninja)
MD
Michael_D_Sullivan
Oct 23, 2005
I found that Noise Ninja was not useful for your picture. However, tools built into CS2 worked very effectively on it.

First, the horizontal lines, which are likely due to clogged printer nozzles or low ink, seemed to indicate a lack of one or more colors along those lines, so I looked at the channels. Bingo: real bad lines in the green channel and slightly less bad lines in the blue channel; red channel had no lines. That suggests we need to first work on the channels showing lines, without also messing up whatever detail there may be elsewhere.

I selected the green channel. Blowing up the magnification, I found that the bad line spacing was a bit above 10 pixels. So I tried the motion blur filter. What worked pretty well was to do motion blur at 90° 12 pixels wide, repeated twice. Then I went to the blue channel, and found that the lines were eliminated with 8 pixels of motion blur at 90°.

Return to RGB. Now we deal with the color noise. I didn’t find the noise reduction filter to be very helpful, but I tried the old standby, Gaussian Blur. It seemed to eliminate a good deal of noise without losing too much detail at 2.3 pixels.

Then I tried Surface Blur. This improved things further at settings of 5 pixels and 30 threshold.

Now, to get some better definition, we need some sharpening. I used Smart Sharpen first to get rid of any vertical blurring to the overall picture resulting from the motion-blur in the blue and green channels, and the settings that seemed to work well were 200%, 12 pixels, motion blur, 90°. I finished with Unsharp Mask at 16%, 8 pixels diameter, 12 threshold.

Here is the result:
< http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1gwk8WNhd5wlhFZYfT z3QDEy0xNWC>
TM
T_Mike_Hyndman
Oct 23, 2005
Michael,

Fantastic result, and well explained, you should publish it as a tutorial.

Regards

TMH
JJ
John Joslin
Oct 23, 2005
…you should publish it as a tutorial.

I agree!
XA
Xaiver_Ashe
Oct 23, 2005
wow… the expert has arrived! Its good to know that I have alot to learn. Thank you so much for taking the time with this.
SB
Stu_Bloom_x
Oct 23, 2005
Michael,

Beautiful!
MV
Mathias_Vejerslev
Oct 23, 2005
I played too!

I first used Imagenomic NoiseWare Pro to kill the chroma noise and most of the luminosity noise. This filter is very easy to use, and powerful. There were still those horizontal lines present, though. So I converted to L*a*b and, as Michael, used Motion Blur but with radius 20 pixels, once on the L channel.

Then I used Smart Sharpen Motion Blur filter on the L channel with a radius of 20 pixels, same angle as before, to remove the motion blur again – this time without the lines.

Some remaining red saturation were limited with the Sponge Tool.

< http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1rtgwoRh0o5c1iWFPL 5qrNXv9r78>

Mathias
MV
Mathias_Vejerslev
Oct 24, 2005
Playing some more, it seems doing the motion blur/smart sharpen routine before denoising yields some more final image detail.

These settings worked good on RGB composite channel:

Motion Blur: 20 pixel (90 degrees), Motion Blur: 14 pixel, Smart Sharpen: 20 pixel – near max amount, full shadow highlight (all settings at 0), Smart Sharpen: 14 pixel, less amount.

Followed by some denoise algortihm for ordinary noise.

How to Master Sharpening in Photoshop

Give your photos a professional finish with sharpening in Photoshop. Learn to enhance details, create contrast, and prepare your images for print, web, and social media.

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