Newbie to lightroom help please!

Morning fellow Nikonites,

I am new to using Lightroom and I want to restore a old picture of my late Grandfather so I can have it framed for a family member. The picture has been scanned directly from a book as we were unable to get the original. The paper was a rough/corrugated type. I want to get it into the best shape possible before printing it.

Can anyone recommend and please give me some tips on the best way to do this.

Many thanks

I don't know if you can do that with Lightroom. I am fairly new to Lightroom but haven't seen anyone else on here trying to do the same thing. What format do you have the picture stored in? I'm assuming .jpg If that's the case, what exactly do you want to do to the picture?

I am no expert, but I'm curious what the more experienced guys here say. This is what I did:
Exposure -.5
Contrast +7
Highlights -33
Clarity +60
Sharpness +70
Masking 80
Luminance 70

Also, I would straighten it a hair and fix that spot on the roof between the two columns on the right. You should be able to do better with the original scan. Mine is probably a little too contrasty now that I look at it.

Looks pretty good to me, maybe bump up the black? I don't think it's too contrasty.

I never tried to fix a scanned photo but this looks pretty good. Didn't think you could do an awefull lot with it being it's not a RAW image. Learn something new everyday.

Nick, you did a great job....how did you do it?

I'm glad I've learned something. Chris, the settings are in the post, I just imported and started sliding. Luminance under noise reduction, I believe, is what best gets rid of the grain.

Here you go...



I created a Preset with the settings here...

Free File Sharing and Storage made Simple.

Download it and import it into LR

nickt said:

I am no expert, but I'm curious what the more experienced guys here say. This is what I did:
Exposure -.5
Contrast +7
Highlights -33
Clarity +60
Sharpness +70
Masking 80
Luminance 70

Also, I would straighten it a hair and fix that spot on the roof between the two columns on the right. You should be able to do better with the original scan. Mine is probably a little too contrasty now that I look at it.

View attachment 93596

Click to expand...

Really nice job with this, nick! I think the contrast comes from the Clarity slider being up high especially on their faces. From working on student theater photos, I found the kids' faces took on this same type of high contrast from setting the Clarity slider too high. What about turning it down for the overall photo then using the brush (is that what's it is called?) to select the non-people areas and adding in more Clarity. That way it can be used selectively.

Both of you did a great job with it. I'm impressed!

Nice, Jake! More pleasing to the eye. I'll load the preset too, so I can learn something from it.

nickt said:

Nice, Jake! More pleasing to the eye. I'll load the preset too, so I can learn something from it.

Click to expand...

A lot more playing around with the highlight, shadow, white and black sliders to find a balance without blowing anything out. It was a weird texture to try and smooth while retaining crispness in the features of the players.

Here's a go at it with PSE + Silver Efex Pro. Ideally I'd love to have both.