One great way to preserve old photographs is to scan them and turn them into digital photographs. Unfortunately, a lot of priceless old photos have had some pretty rough lives, and it’s not uncommon for these heirlooms to be torn and stained. While it’s possible to fix up these images with photo editing software, restoration techniques can often be extremely time-consuming, complex, and painstaking work.
There are several software applications on the market that are specifically designed to simplify the photo restoration process, and one of these is AKVIS Retoucher, a plugin that is compatible with Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro as well as several other photo editing applications. (See this table for a full list of photo editors that support Retoucher.)
How well does it work? I found an old photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt and family at the National Archives and Records Administration that seemed a perfect candidate on which to test the plugin since it had a very visible crease mark in addition to a lot of dust-speckled areas. The images below show the photo before and after using Retoucher.
(Click any image for a larger view.)
That is a definite improvement, but we still need to determine whether these results are better than what can be accomplished without using Retoucher, how easy the plugin is to use, and a few other matters. Although there is both a Windows and a Mac version of the plugin, we’ll only be looking at the one developed for Windows and testing it in Paint Shop Pro.
Everything went fine with the download and installation of Retoucher. Once it is installed, you may have to add it to your list of recognized plugin locations in order for your photo editing software to recognize it.
AKVIS Retoucher has a very simple user interface, and it’s fairly straightforward to apply. Before calling in the plugin, you do have to select the areas of the photograph that you want to fix. You can select them and correct them one at a time, but it will save some time if you select multiple areas at once.
After selecting the problem areas, you can access the plugin which will open in a new window.
From here, all you have to do is click the green “restore” button to apply the changes if you want to use the default settings. There are only three settings you have to worry about modifying here – search radius, compare radius, and variance.
When you’re ready to apply the changes, just click the “apply button” and you’ll be returned to your image editor with the modified photography. All in all, it’s a very quick and easy process.
Next: We conclude this review on page 2 with a look at the performance, price, and overall rating of AKVIS Retoucher 3.0.