Restore old faded photos--remember Digital ROC?

[gurtch]

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

 

[Required]

One option is to run windows as a VM in VirtualBox and install PS and the plugin there.
VirtualBox is totally free for personal and eval use but if you're a corporation and enable the extension pack I believe it complicates things.

Otherwise NegativeLab is liked by many which use LR.

Negative Lab Pro

A brilliant Lightroom plugin for color negativ film conversion. All-Raw, non-destructive workflow. Download a FREE trial now.

www.negativelabpro.com

 

[hcubell]

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, NJView attachment 212224

You may want to check out the book by the master of photo restoration, Ctein. Digital Restoration from Start to Finish. The book is likely to address whether there are new one click software alternatives to Digital ROC.
I use an old MacBook with an old version of MacOS to run my Imacon scanner and I used to use the Digital ROC plug in for the scans, but I can't recall the workflow in any detail at this point.

 

[MartinN]

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?

I love old software and even operating systems. If you have the installation programs and licenses, I would certainly try to use them, if only for a single task. The problem with Mac and Mac OS is that the new operatingsystems prevent the use of old software, sooner or later. Not so much with Windows, you should be able to install and run software from the Windows XP era. Scanners and old hardware are much more demanding, SCSI is very obsolete and Firewire soon to be. I save old hardware for old software, if something prevents more modern use.

 

[MartinN]

Adobe and other big software manufacturers had a quirk, eventually their software needed online activation and they very soon shut down their old activation servers. Curse, so bad.

 

[MartinN]

I downloaded and installed ROC Plugin , but it does not show up in the "FILTERS" menu or CS3.

That is a bit strange and would need investigation. The real problems started with CS5 when there were 64bit and 32bit PS programs. A 64bit plugin is needed for 64bit PS and 32bit are all old plugins and probably usable in the 32bit bit PS. Of course a safe bet is to match the PS production year with plugin production year, but I can’t belive CS3 would have problems with old plugins, if not very ancient.

 

[MartinN]

I downloaded and installed ROC Plugin , but it does not show up in the "FILTERS" menu or CS3.

You can have a look in the Photoshop Plugin directory, for CS3 specically, and is the plugin there ?.
"C:\Program Files x86\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop <year>\Plug-ins". Plugins were probably .8bf files.

 

[tenmangu81]

There is a beta function which appeared some time ago in Photoshop 2024 which does a very good job. Just go to Neural filters.... and restoration, at the bottom of the menu.

 

[Alan]

A hack/trick if you use the Negative Lab Pro plugin in Lightroom: manually invert the image in PS or other, then convert the ‘negative’ with NLP.

 

[gurtch]

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

 

[MGrayson]

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

There's your problem! (Sorry... Us old timers still think that that's a lot of memory. My *phone* has more storage and power than a CRAY 2.)

 

[gurtch]

I meant 32 GB RAM, which I have found sufficient for Photoshop CS 5 and CS6, which I also have on my PC.
Thanks
Dave

 

[Mexecutioner]

32GB should be fine for the current version of PS.

 

[gurtch]

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

 

[tenmangu81]

Good job, indeed !! The guy at the right looks very much like Albert Einstein, when he was young....

 

[Mexecutioner]

That's great! Such a nice present for your friend!