How to enhance old black and white photos

renke · **Joined:** Aug 28, 2025 **Posts:** 10

GIMP 2.10.34 on Linux
How to enhance old black and white photos, for printing? Original cards scanned to tiff or jpg. Many photos have a brownish tint.

sallyanne · **Posted:** Thu Aug 28, 2025 7:28 pm **(#2)**

Depends what your photo needs. Can you post it here?
Maybe some contrast, sharpening, denoising. Does the photo need repairing at all? For printing it is good to have it at least 300ppi

renke · **Joined:** Aug 28, 2025 **Posts:** 10

photo size 88 x 138 mm, scanned at 600 dpi, jpeg and tiff format.

Issabella · **Posted:** Sat Aug 30, 2025 12:40 pm **(#4)**

my try

rich2005 · **Joined:** Mar 04, 2011 **Posts:** 2603

Nice old photograph.

A couple of possibilities

There are plenty of dust speckles, try Filters -> Enhance -> Noise Reduction. It is slow at higher values do be patient.

Use Colors -> Levels and "Auto Input Levels" Then go straight into Color Curves and adjust the value curve. Make sure you have the Merge filter enabled.

Gimp 3.0.4 (kubuntu 24.04 - Appimage) is bit lacking in sharpen filters (install the gmic plugin for more), but using Filters -> Enhance -> Wavelet Decompose gets me this:

Attachment:

2a.jpg [ 994.08 KiB | Viewed 9037 times ]

A one-and-a half minute video of that: https://i.imgur.com/8cPWR8D.mp4

Rod · **Joined:** May 16, 2010 **Posts:** 16023

I just ran it through Filters>Enhance>sharpen unsharp mask (GEGL with preview).

After that you may want to remove the noise as Rich stated.

Rod · **Joined:** May 16, 2010 **Posts:** 16023

Or perhaps Filters>Enhance>Noise Reduction. After sharpen unsharp mask.

Rod · **Joined:** May 16, 2010 **Posts:** 16023

Results

renke · **Joined:** Aug 28, 2025 **Posts:** 10

Thanks for tips! I haven't used GIMP before. All the results look very good, but I liked Rich's result a little better. (and thanks for video, too) However, which version will look better on paper can only be seen after printing. Is it better work with jpeg or tiff?

Nutello · **Posted:** Sat Aug 30, 2025 7:10 pm **(#10)**

Wow!
I never saw that Wavelet-decompose before! Looks like a very strong tool.

rich2005 · **Joined:** Mar 04, 2011 **Posts:** 2603

renke wrote:

...snip... Is it better work with jpeg or tiff?

Jpeg was made for photographs and it is a lossy format, Image information is lost depending on the amount of compression That is not linear, 95 down to about 75 - not much loss in quality but large change in file size. Under compression about 50 and lower, not much change in file size but noticeable loss in quality. You get jpeg edge artifacts.

Tiff is a wrapper and comes in many variations. In Gimp you can have a lossless Tiff which makes large file size or a variety of lossless but compressed tiff files. Often you get a tiff from a scanner by default.

Always Save your work initially as a Gimp .xcf file, it is lossless and keeps layers, masks, selections..all sorts which are lost with other formats.

sallyanne · **Posted:** Sun Aug 31, 2025 4:22 am **(#12)**

My try
Desaturate using luminance - under - colours - desaturate
Despeckle to get rid of extra dots. - under iflters - enhance
Duplicate your image and layer mode multiply 90% on top layer Should get rid of the haze.
Merge down then duplicate again and this time do High pass - under filters - enhance at 55-56
Overlay layer mode then merge down.
For a sharper image unsharp mask. Under Filter - Enhance
Rectangle select - crop image to selection to get rid of the white borders. If you want more borders there is border under decor.
If the image is too dark now lighten a little with curves. A slight S should do. - Under colours curves. Leave on value.
Also give it some contrast. (which I didn't do to this one) Not too much or you will blow out the whites. About 9. Under colour as well.
Unless stated all things are at default

renke · **Joined:** Aug 28, 2025 **Posts:** 10

there is a some dark spot on the top right on card, it's unclear whether this is a natural appearance of the leaves from sunlight, or this is an artifact, perhaps from touching with a finger.