How to restore old photo with "colors and grain" script
This article is english version of my previous tutor on restoring old photos in russian.
Original is placed here.
Lets look to the photo below. This is the photo of the soviet army officer, at the second world war, his name is Mikle Petrovich Gavrilov. He was been a great pilot of soviet air forces, and this is one of the best saved photos of him. Now, we want to restore main picture details, without glamour facing or cleaning all garbage.
Source is:

load it to GIMP

and with a
"colors and grain" script obtain grain and colors layers. switch off visible of the "grain" layer, choose the "colors" layer and, with a smudge tool remove all "white color-jumps" on the сhaps, results will look like:

switch visible of "grain" on, choose layer, and with a clone tool (stamp) remove all chaps with the near-placed facture. results will look like:

create new layer from visible, and corrent brightness and contrast (5/30):

add a copy of layer, and make it mode sharpen with "unsharp mask":

set opacity of this layer to 50%, add black mask to this layer and with a white brush draw the eyes, eyebrows, a mouth, cheeks, a chin line, a figure contour, a belt contour, distinctions on a collar. results is:

compare, old and new ones:

save results to a hard drive:

p.s. sorry for english, it is not my own language
| Leon |
07.11.2011, 23:52:44 |
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| it's nice to hear. in fact, the script was originated from the same problem so I tried to restore family photos of the last century. I gradually realized that the execution of a sequence of operations most successfully solves most problems, and save it as the script. |
| ProximaTori |
07.11.2011, 23:03:54 |
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| Thanks Leon, I am working on a small but time-consuming project of restoring my family photographs. Some of them date back 112 years. Your method along with your script has proved to be very effective and saved me a lot of time. I really appreciate it! |
| Leon |
30.09.2011, 23:13:53 |
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| http://www.loribravo.com/?p=578 |
| Leon |
30.09.2011, 23:11:36 |
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| several days ago was started to work with GIMP in my new ubuntu. i used google, and found link to this page. i'm very glad what this script really helps to restore photos. |
| Leon |
06.04.2011, 20:12:50 |
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| glad to listen :) |
| mahvin |
05.04.2011, 10:18:16 |
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| Excellent method. I really appreciate this tutorial. Many thanks. :) |