Restore Old Faded Photos--Remember Digital ROC?

[Dave Gurtcheff]

An old friend posted an image on Facebook of himself with siblings and Dad and uncle. He is about 12 in the photo.  I graduated from high school 69 years ago and have not seen him since. The image was color but has faded badly and the color is screwed up (different color layers I assume fade faster that others). I would like to surprise him with a restored image. In the past, I purchased and used a wonderful program many years ago called "Digital ROC'" made by "Applied Science Fiction". A wonderful Gentleman in Germany that I purchased his own design and 3D printed Film Holders for my Nikon 8000  medium format film scanner, published a download for Digital Roc Plug in. I successfully down loaded it and also the Release Notes for it. The latest version of Photoshop it is listed to run with is CS3. I have original disks of Photoshop going back to version 3. I have 3.0, 3.04, 3.05 (for Windows 95), 5.0, 6.0 Upgrade, 7.0, CS, CS5 and CS6. I downloaded and installed ROC Plugin , but it does not show up in the "FILTERS" menu or CS3.  I could try installing an old version of Photoshop (probably CS) and then downloading and installing ROC again. My fear is that Photoshop CS may not install on Windows 10.

As a corollary, with all the hoopla about AI I would have thought someone would come up with an AI based photo restoration program. I do not want to individually color each person and object, I want something like ROC: One click and done. Any suggestions or warnings about installing a very old version of Photoshop, then installing a legacy program like ROC on it as a Plug In?

Or any suggestions for a modern program for restoring faded color photos, similar to ROC?

I am also going to post this on The Medium Format Forum...lots of very sharp folks over there.

Thanks

Dave Gurtcheff

Beach Haven, NJ

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Hi Dave,

Not sure if it works on a scan of a reflective print, but "VueScan" (https://www.hamrick.com/download.html) has an option to "Restore color" from scans of faded filmstock (https://www.hamrick.com/support/how-to-guides/how-to-restore-faded-slides.html#how-to-use-vuescan-to-restore-faded-slides). If you happen to have VueScan, it would be easy enough to give it a try when you're able to trick it into seeing it as a slide scan.

If everything else fails, Curves adjustments for the individual R/G/B channels are the best way, because the colors fade at different rates and not necessarily linearly.

Good luck,
Bart

[Dave Gurtcheff]

At age 87 I decided to bite the bullet and purchase a yearly subscription to Photoshop, as all this AI hoopla interested me. I do often mask out foregrounds of my seascapes and put in another sky . I have a big collection of many different skies to call on. Masking foregrounds is tedious, and supposedly the new PS makes this very easy. This fact plus the Neural Filters to restore old photos with one click interested me. It is always a little scary for me whenever I "upgrade" my PC, either the operating system or big fat programs like Photoshop. So I downloaded Photoshop 2024. The first error message I got was: "CORTANA IN WINDOWS AS A STANDALONE APP IS DEPRECATED". What the F? No clue what that even means. But the second error message was more disturbing: "YOUR GRAPHICS PROCESSOR IS INCOMPATIBLE", DIRECT x UNAVAILABLE, AND INSUFFICIENT VRAM  (O MB OF 1500 MB REQUIRED). I recently upgraded my PC with SSDs and 32MB RAM, was not looking to change the graphics card (I don't do it, I have a PC Guru that does it for me). Any advice? If I don't upgrade the Graphics card will the new PS features work? Maybe I bit off more than I can chew this time.

Thanks all for the help

Dave

[Dave Gurtcheff]

First: Thanks all for your help. Here is where I am. I now have subscription Photoshop 2024, as much as that irks me as CS6 is like a comfortable old shoe, and I own it outright. I still have it on my PC along with CS5, all with legacy plug-ins. I realize PS 2024 can probably duplicate the plug-ins, but I am familiar with the old stuff.  My PC repair guy will put in a new graphics card, supposedly a good compromise between speed and affordability. It is an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti. PS 2024 does indeed have a one click solution to restore old photos. Here is the 70 year old photo from Facebook of a boyhood friend and his  family. I have not seen him since high school. The restoration could be better if I wanted to spend a lot of time tweaking it, but he was thrilled with the restoration as presented. Damn, that makes me feel good!

Dave

[Dave Gurtcheff]

For some reason only one file uploaded. Here is the original before restoration.
Dave