Restoring Old Photos with Photoshop

There are a few basic steps to take in restoring your photos, but obviosly each photo will be unique. Some will need little attention, but others might be in quite poor condition.

Scan your photo in at about 600dpi

I scan my colour pics at 400dpi which makes a 5Mb file

I scan my black & white pics at 600dpi in COLOUR which makes a 15Mb file, but I remove the colour later which decreases the size a great deal. Scanning in greyscale loses a lot of detail, especially defects such as tears which show up better in colour. Use Photoshop to convert the picture to greyscale after you have retouched the picture.

Crop the white borders from the picture as these white areas will affect the 'Auto Levels' function. You can add a border later by resizing the canvas (not reszing the image) area by around 105 per cent.

Save the image as a Photoshop (.PSD) file. You can convert it to JPEG or PICT later to decrease the file size, but it will also decrease the picture quality.

Once you have done this to your photos create a duplicate file as a backup, then you just work on copies of the files without affecting your originals.

Look at your photo and spot the defects such as rips, creases, poor colours, etc and then decide how best to repair them.

I will usually add 'Auto Levels' so I get the best contrast and restore the colours to their natural state. Photos tend to go brown after time so the 'Auto Levels' looks for the lightest and darkest areas which should be white and black and recalibrates the picture using the values it finds, hence removing the border eliminates this being used as white - it is not the true white of the picture but the true white of the photographics paper. If the picture still does not look right revert and change the levels manually.

Use the clone tool (use a brush rather than a pencil as it has a soft edge) for small rips, creases and the major dots that appear on the picture. If they are on a plain wall these should hide quite well, but with textures and other details things will be more tricky.

	(The images on this page have been resized to 72dpi ) Original Image Info: image size: 8cm x 11 cm (1908 x 2748 pixels) File size: 15Mb Resolution: 600dpi Date: Early 1969 This is an early image of me, notice the colour difference on either side. The right side is the original scan, with the brown fade. The left side has been adjusted with the Auto levels which has created a better contrast and removed some of the brown. (converting to greyscale will remove it all but then you would not see the comparison here)
	The bottome left corner has a crease through the picture. The chair and ground were easy to clone but the leg required zooming in and using a smaller brush.
	Here is the retouched version of the picture