Photo editing program to use for b&w photo

[yomibro]

I have a black and white picture taken around the 1930's of my grandfather which I would like to edit, the picture is probably a copy of a copy so it's pretty grainy and a lot of detail has been lost already not to mention that a past family member also used a pen/marker to highlight some details at one point in time.

Can anyone recommend a photo editing program that I can use to improve the picture details/quality and possibly even try to convert it to color? Will something like Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 do the trick? Tried using iPhoto but there isn't really that much options to play with for what I am looking for.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

 

[sickmacdoc]

Photoshop Elements 6 will indeed be helpful as it is kind of aimed in that direction (at least when compared with the full Photoshop CS3). Assuming you have a decent quality scanner to grab the image in the first place you should be able to help it out quite a bit!

You will certainly be able to do a LOT more than working with it in iPhoto even thought the editing tools in iPhoto have improved a lot in the latest version.

There are a lot of tutorials on the web regarding old photo restoration, so some research there would probably be helpful- and PS Elements 6 should give you the tools to accomplish the restoration/enhancement. If something doesn't work, then revert and try it again!

Also google "photo colorizing" or similar to find a lot of tutorials on that as well.

One last thought- you might want to consider the free open source image editing program GIMP which has come a long way over time. You can check it out at http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/ but personally I would rather use PS Elements 6.

 

[yomibro]

Thanks, I'll give Gimp a try and see how it works out.