could anyone tell me a quick way of removing a coffee stain from a photograph,

-- catherine (catherine.jean@ic24.net), July 13, 1999

Answers

Scissors. Sorry, I couln'd help myself.

Seriously, I doubt that anything will remove such a stain without destroying the photo.

-- Steve (tuna-boat-captain@ibm.net), July 13, 1999.

First off I am going to assume that this is a one of a kind picture that there are no other copies in exsitence or a negative available. The first thing you need to do is get it scanned into a digital image so that you have a copy. After you have done that you might try a eye glass cleaner liquid but I think that will of limited success and I am not sure of the short or long term effects on the picture itself. I think you best bet will be to clean it up on the digitally scanned image. Don't forget to keep a copy of the original scanned image in case you need to come back to it if the first tries at correcting the image don't work. There are places that can do this for you, but unless this is a save at all cost type photo it could cost more than you are willing to pay.

-- Bob G. (rgreg88721@hotmail.com), July 14, 1999.

Catherine,

What type of photograph do you have (b&w or color)? Have you simply tried rewashing and drying it? I have been in the lab business for more years than I care to think about, and this would seem to me to be the simplest and easiest way to handle this unless, of course, you're talking about an inkjet print.

-- fred deaton (fdeaton@airnet.net), July 14, 1999.

If your only answer ends up being digitizing the photo and then digitally removing the stain, I suggest going out to Adobe's Web site and checking out their section of articles. Amongst them is one specifically on digital stain removal. Though it specifically addresses a stain on a scanned painting, the method should apply just as well to a photograph.

-- Barbara Coultry (bcoultry@nycap.rr.com), July 15, 1999.

On the Adobe Photoshop version 4 CD-ROM, there is a live demo movie -- you see the cursor move around, etc. as you hear the running commentary -- by an extremely competant Adobe employee that treats of this very subject, although I think it was tomato juice, not coffee, he removed from a scanned image.

And he does it in a masterful way, without lasso-ing the stained area -- basically he breaks the image into R-G-B color channels, and uses info from the channel least affected by the stain to rebuild the original image without a stain.

-- bruce komusin (bkomusin@bigfoot.com), July 25, 1999.