How to/Best Methods to Correct Washed Out JPEGs?

Question

I have many photos that have that washed out look about them and some that are completely blown out. These photos are JPEG only and were not taken (or I do not have) the RAW file. I currently attempt to salvage them using Camera RAW and some layer adjustments in Photoshop. What are some tips and techniques that I can attempt to use to correct these photos and restore them to best state possible?

Note: I currently use only Camera RAW and Photoshop. However answers that are for Lightroom (or other programs) are welcomed as other users may find them beneficial.

Example Photograph that I would like to use for something:

Source of Photo

Other examples would be photos that look like there is a haze over the subjects.

Answer 1

It's amazing what you can do just using the Levels dialog in Photoshop.

To get this version of the example image in the original question, I converted the greyscale image to RGB at 16 bits (Image->Mode) to give PS some room to smooth out the adjustments, then hit ctrl+L to bring up the levels dialog. Moving the black slider until the shadows were well-defined fixed the tonality. (There was no actual black in the histogram, but the darkest darks are only a hair above black.)

Then, because I can't leave well enough alone, I gave the image a quick pass using the Topaz Labs DeNoise plugin and killed a couple of the most obvious scratches using the spot healing brush (in CS3) before re-converting to 8-bit.

There was a lot more spotting that could have been done, and I suppose the curve could have been tweaked, but the main problem with the source image was simple fading. Fading of the darks and staining (yellowing) of the whites are the most common problems with old B&W photos, and the effects of both of those problems can be handled with the sliders in the Levels dialog. (With colour photos, the three colour channels will have faded at different rates and need to be adjusted separately). If there are actual blacks and whites, you can use the eyedropper tools to set the black and white points, and if there is something in the image you know should be about the same tonality as a grey card, you can use the grey point eyedropper for that.

There was no discernable sky content -- it's very likely the picture was taken with a blue-sensitive panchromatic film using no filtration. A lot of old black and white snapshots are simply not going to have a useful sky since you need to use a yellow filter to get any tones much lower than white. If you want a sky, you need to invent one or transplant one from another photograph.

Photo restoration can get to be a long, involved process, but the initial stages -- the steps that are going to account for most of the improvement -- are generally fairly simple. There will be a lot of work anyway, so there's no sense making things harder than they need to be.

Answer 2

Here are a few methods I would use. I would certainly recommend doing it in Camera Raw, since you can fine tune a lot of adjustments at once.

If you have truly blown out areas, they will not be recoverable, but the main thing you'll want to do is lower the overall exposure and probably bring up the black point so that you have good overall contrast (histogram covering all or most of the range of exposure values, depending of course on the subject matter).

Camera Raw

Basically you want (for most images) to adjust the sliders so that you have a histogram that covers the full range of values. Since your washed out images will have the histogram bunched to the right, you want to lower the exposure (and/or use recovery slider) to bring back the brightest areas off the right edge of the histogram. Then use the blacks slider to set the darkest areas to black (if suitable).

In Camera Raw, you can also drop the brightness, add a curve or boost the saturation as needed. You may still want to do levels/curves adjustments in photoshop, but Camera Raw adjustments should give you a good starting point.

Using Camera Raw - no spot removal or denoise :)

Multiply Blend Mode

A common method that I've seen is to simply add a levels adjustment and set the blend mode to multiply (without making any changes to the levels slider). And repeat as necessary to restore some contrast. I guess that's a simple method, but I'd rather do it in Camera Raw where you have more control.

Using a levels adjustment layer with multiply blend mode. Not quite as crisp as the ACR adjustments.

Curves Adjustment Layer

If truly washed out, you may want to reduce the exposure in Camera Raw or with an Exposure adjustment layer, then:

• Add a threshold adjustment layer. Move the sliders to determine the brightest and darkest areas of the image.

• Add a curves layer, and then use the black and white eyedropper tools to set the black and white points as found in the first step.

• Throw away the threshhold layer.

This will make the blacks truly black and give you that histogram that covers the full range of exposure values (assuming your image ought to contain full blacks and whites, i.e. not the picture of a white cat on snow).

Histogram before:

and after:

With most images I would aim to get the blacks near the left edge, but that would result in too much loss of detail in the shadows in this image.