Cloudy or foggy picture

[Patricia.A]

Have a photo which is very dark, but have few of parents so trying to salvage the worst pictures. It is too dark. When I try to lighten it, it just gets more foggy. Any suggestions welcome!! Have already used automatic white balance, levels, de noise, and some other things that were not really helpful. I uploaded the picture but not sure it did so successfully.

[David Wood]

Hi Patricia, I don't see any pictures, you'll have to upload them.

[Rod]

Try this - http://gimps.de/en/tutorials/gimp/pictu ... /index.htm
#1 create a brightening layer
Duplicate the original image layer in the layers dialog. Change the Mode of this duplicated layer to Value -mode to use this layer for a retouching brightening of colors. Further editing of the image, without this masking layer , could lead to a change of original hue and colors within the picture.

#2 improve brightness
Apply the Color » Levels -dialog to the retouching layer for manual or automatic correction of brightness, color and contrast. Click on the Auto Correction -Button in the levels Dialog to try Gimp's automatic correction of brightness, color and contrast.

#3 check color change
Switch off the visibility of the first original layer of the image to check the change or difference in colors of the retouching layer.

If the hue and colors of the original layer affect the image badly you can just delete the original layer.
Otherwise combine all layers in the image or try the manual brightness correction, if the automatic correction did not work for your image.

[Patricia.A]

Thank yoou for the sugfestions. I am certainly going to try them. I did try to upload the picture but apparently not successful. How do you upload a picture to this site?

[David Wood]

Upload it to a site like http://imageshack.us or http://tinypic.com and share the link.

[virtualTune]

Still trying to upload picture so you can see how dark and what I am dealing with. Used imageshack

Spoiler: show

Hope I did it correctly this time.

[Kajida]

Patricia, I played with your picture for awhile today to see what was possible. I understand wanting to try to retouch and save older pictures. I have one of my great grandfather that was in pretty rough shape and spent over 6 hours retouching it. Thankfully it was just damage to the original photo and not an exposure or film issue.

Anyways, just messed around with this for about 30 minutes or so to see what was possible. Here's what I got, with the understanding of just wanting to see your parents and not really caring about the background too much.

Spoiler: show

I'm also attaching the XCF so you can see the direction I was thinking and maybe give you some ideas and get a better result then I did. Hope this helps.

[David Wood]

Here is my result: I just darkened the background but you can remove that in the XCF if you want.

Spoiler: show

restoration.png

The second layer I applied Auto White Balance to. It's under Colors> Auto> White Balance.

[Arzoroc]

I had a slightly lighter result.

momdad300.png

(click for a much better view)