: How to remove coloured degradation from old photo in GIMP I have a lot of old photos in my family history file. The one I'm looking at has obviously suffered from some kind of degradation

@BetL875

There are several issues with the digitized source that I am going to tackle in the steps below using Gimp-


Remove sepia and green stain by choosing Colors > Desaturate


Weaken the scratches


Choose a sensible Colors > Treshold value to obtain an inverted "scratch" template.


Copy this template onto the desaturated original from 1. in "Overlay"-Mode



Adjust the Color Curve to control lights and shadows


Despeckle photo with the Filters > Enhance > Despeckle tool




The huge black scratches can best be removed manually. Still, mostly because of the quite bad degradation the photo suffered the results are far from optimal.



We can also see quite strong JPG-artifacts in this enhanced version. THis may be much better when working on an uncompressed source scan.

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@Holmes874

Unfortunately the cyan haze is opaque. No software can see what's behind it.

Option 1:


turn the haze to less optrusive by turning it's brightness region more flat with the curves tool
Reduce flat haze by shifting the black level to higher with the curves tool
recolor the image to monochrome.


The result:



This makes hazed areas nearly black, which probably isn't wanted

Option 2:

Goto a specialist who check, if the error is not in the photo emulsion, but in the upper surface. Then he maybe can remove the haze mechanically or chemically. I can see, that someone has wipd part of the haze off.

Of course he can have wiped off some chemical that has spoiled the photo elsewhere. In that case yoy are out of luck.

Option 3:

Try to find another image which contains some vanished details. They probably can be moved from a photo to another.

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