How to Edit and Correct a Scanned Image

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By Richard Burke
eHow Contributing Writer

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Corrected Scan

Scanning old images and slides is fun and a great way to archive your fading images; however, no matter how hard you try, each scan will have to be edited in an image-editing program. If nothing else, you will need to retouch spots and artifacts that have been scanned in. In most cases you will have to adjust the highlight, shadow, saturation and contrast to recreate the lost original. In this article I will show you my method for doing this and hopefully save you some time. I used to always retouch spots and scratches first because they are so annoying. I have learned to do this step last, since adjusting the image may reveal more spots and scratches and I hate having to do the same procedure twice. So read below to discover a method for editing scanned images. In this article I will demonstrate using iPhoto, but the steps are the same regardless of your image-editing program.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

iPhoto or another image-editing program
A scanned image file

Step 1

Crop Image

When you look at this image you may think: oh, why bother? It has a lot of artifacts, lost contrast, oversaturated colors. The fact is that many scans of old slides may look just like this, but they are editable. The first step is to crop the image to lose the fuzzy borders from the slide holder. The crop is modest and does not really impact the composition, but will save a lot of retouching later.
Step 2

Adjust Exposure

Adjust the exposure. The exposure was fairly accurate on the slide, so this cannot be a major adjustment. As you adjust the slider pay careful attention to the highlights. If you increase the exposure too much, the highlights will start to go specular. Adjust the slider too far and then come back to the correct exposure correction.
Step 3

Adjust Contrast

Adjust the contrast. Notice this is a large adjustment, but the original had a lot of contrast. As we lower the contrast the shadow areas begin to open up. While you make adjustments, pay attention to the spectrograph and notice how the contrast adjustment has spread the image out.
Step 4

Adjust Shadows

Adjust the highlights. The highlights in this image look OK though, and require little or no adjustment. The shadows, however, are still plugged up so we made a major adjustment to the shadow. Notice you can now see the detail in the water and other shadow areas. Fine you say, but now the color is totally off. This is true and also demonstrates why you need to do things in the proper order. If you had adjusted color first and then the shadow and highlight, you would just need to adjust color again.
Step 5

Adjust Color

Adjust color. First we need to decrease the amount of saturation and then adjust the color temperature. Adjust the saturation until the amount of color seems normal, then adjust the color temperature, which is similar to adjusting white balance on your camera. Finally, adjust the tint if you need to, which is really an adjustment to the hue. When the colors are pleasing, stop, walk away and come back in 10 minutes. Sometime you have to stop looking at the image to get the correct balance. After resting your eyes, make any final color adjustments.
Step 6

Retouch Image

Get out the retouching brush and retouch and eliminate the artifacts and scratches. Before you begin retouching, adjust the sharpness and de-noise sliders. De-noise will help to eliminate some of the graininess of the image. Most color slides will lose a little sharpness over time and you may want to increase the sharpness to counter the effects. After retouching the image, you are done. Save the image under a new file name and you now have a restored digital image of an old memory! It does take some time and practice, so start with the images that are most important to you.