28 January 2014

RetroReveal

At Saturday's OGS Ottawa Branch meeting Kyla Ubbink spoke about RetroReveal, a free online tool to uncover hidden text, see faded inks and photographs, and discover what may lie beneath.

To use it go to retroreveal.org, register for a free account and upload an image. Small images work best. You can crop an image after initial processing and resubmit. The program "transforms images from a standard RGB colorspace into a variety of other colorspaces", so it works best on colour images. I found a faded sepia photo of my great uncle, killed in WW1, was improved. Kyla recommended using the RetroReveal output  in conjunction with Photoshop, or other similar software.

Thanks to Paul Jones for a correction to the web address.

1 comment:

Gail Roger said...

I tried this with a faded photo of my husband's grandparents taken in the late 1930s-early 1940s somewhere in London. I had already substantially enhanced the photo on my iPhotos, but tried cropping the photo for a closer portrait of just the two of them as they are standing with their nephew. I was startled by how much clearer the image is, even after my initial tinkering! Thanks for sharing this; I'm going to have some fun!