Restoring old photographs

Everyone has an album (or box full) of old and faded photographs. Usually these are in poor condition, either through wear and tear or because they were poorly printed in the fist place.  Often the photos were taken with an old box camera, with a lens of dubious quality. But some of the photos have value as family heirlooms and are well worth preserving and restoring. The question is, can you extract the underlying image from the damaged and faded photograph?  The answer is almost always "yes", sometimes miraculously so.

This article runs you through an exercise in photo restoration, using Photoshop's Levels and Curves tools, plus the Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tools. Using this exercise as a starting point, you'll be ready to hone your skills on the family's precious photos of Auntie Nellie and Uncle Fred, and earn the admiration of all your relatives! (Of course, there could also be commercial opportunities, too!)

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Overview

First: scan your original

These days you don’t need an expensive scanner to get remarkably good results when scanning photographs.  My cheap CanoScan 670N does an excellent job. Whatever scanner you have will have come with the necessary software to interface with Photoshop.  You access the scanning process via File > Import > . You should see a drop down with available scanners listed.

When you select the scanner, it should run the proprietary software that came with it.  This will allow you to set the scan resolution, color mode etc.  The interface varies from scanner to scanner.  Suffice to say you need to select the area of the photograph you want to scan, the resolution and color.  I'd suggest you start with 300dpi and full color.  You can always change things in Photoshop later.

Tip: if the photograph is small like the one I'm using in this exercise, scan at least at 300dpi or even 600dpi.  The chances are you'll want to crop the image and print it out at a larger scale than the original so there's no sense in starting with something that's too small.

For this exercise, I've provided a scanned image to work with, called original.psd.  It's the output of a Canon scanner in color at 300dpi.  Open it in Photoshop and we'll begin.

David Nicholls

David NichollsDavid lives in Canberra, Australia. He trained in Upper Atmospheric Physics, but spent longer than he cares to admit as a Science bureaucrat in the Australian Government. He has been building websites since 1997, professionally since 1999. He is the co-author with Linda Rathgeber of "Playing with Fire", contributed the accessibility chapter to Dreamweaver MX Magic, and other bits and pieces. He has academic publications in areas as diverse as astrophysics and fractal ferns. His interests include photography, restoring golf antiques, collecting old
78 records, fern ecology, and he's also a HiFi freak. He teaches astronomy at a local community college."

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Reviews

Black and White only

February 23, 2006 by Glynn Fox

A very good article for Black and White restoration.  I am trying to restore colored slides and as no color restoration is covered in this article I would have thought this should be mentioned in the outline.

Still an excellent article.

GF

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