How to restore an old photo

Decide which problem you have

People say restore to mean three different jobs. A creased print needs repair. A black-and-white portrait that has gone grey and flat needs tone correction. A photo of a face too small to see needs upscaling, which is a different kind of guesswork. Most photos need two of the three. Working this out first stops you paying for the wrong service.

• Repair. Removing dust, scratches, creases, and stains, and closing small tears. The image is still there; the damage sits on top of it.
• Tone and colour. Fixing a yellow cast, faded contrast, or adding colour to a black-and-white photo. Nothing is added or removed, only adjusted.
• Upscaling. Enlarging a small or soft image. Software has to invent detail here. It is usually good with skin and cloth, and bad with text, jewellery, and eyes.

Scan the print before you restore it

No restoration can be better than the file it starts from. If you are working from a paper print, scan it yourself when you can. A phone photo of a photo loses detail in the highlights, and the highlights are usually the faces.

1. Take the print out of the frame and off the glass. Glass holds a second reflection nobody wants.
2. Scan at 600 dpi for prints 8×10 or smaller, 300 dpi for anything larger. More than that rarely adds anything from paper.
3. Save as TIFF or PNG, not JPEG. Every JPEG save throws away detail you cannot get back.
4. Scan in colour even if the photo is black and white. The yellowing and the paper texture are information, and a good restorer uses them.
5. Do not tape, laminate, or glue anything before scanning. Tape yellows, and it eats paper.

If the only copy is a phone snap from years ago, use what you have. Just know that small faces and fine detail are gone, and no tool brings them back honestly.

What can be fixed

• Dust, mould spots, and foxing, which are the brown speckles that appear on old paper.
• Scratches and creases, including ones that run across a face.
• Fading and yellowing, and the flat grey look of a print that has lost its contrast.
• Small tears and missing corners, filled in from the surrounding texture.
• Colour casts from aged chemistry or a bad scan. These are usually the easiest fix of all.

What cannot be fixed honestly

This is the part most services will not tell you.

• A face blurred by movement or out of focus. Sharpening makes it crisp and still wrong. If the source is a blur, no tool gives you a recognisable likeness.
• A hole where someone's eye or mouth used to be. Anything filled in is a guess, and it will look like the restorer's idea of a face, not your grandmother's.
• Water damage that has lifted the emulsion off the paper. That layer of the image is physically gone.
• Details that were never in the frame, such as a ring, a house number, or a face in the background.
• Handwriting that has faded to nothing. It can be darkened, not recovered.

A good restorer says no to these, or does them and tells you exactly what was invented. Be wary of anyone promising a perfect result from a photo with half a face missing.

The order that works

If you are doing this yourself in an editor, work in this order. Doing it out of order is why home restorations end up looking like plastic.

1. Neutralise the colour cast first. Otherwise every later decision is judged against the wrong white.
2. Remove dust and scratches on a duplicate layer, at 100% zoom, before any tonal work. Damage hides in low contrast and reappears once you raise it.
3. Repair tears and missing areas.
4. Adjust levels and contrast. Old prints are usually flat. You are restoring the range the paper lost, not adding contrast for its own sake.
5. Only then colourise, if you want colour at all. Colour hides tone mistakes, so fix tone first.
6. Sharpen last, and lightly. Over-sharpening is the most common giveaway of an amateur restoration.

Work on a copy. Keep the original scan untouched in its own folder, and never overwrite it. You will want it again in five years, when the tools are better.

When to pay a person instead of a tool

Software is good at dust, tone, and colour. It is bad at judgement: which eye was which, whether the crease ran through the mouth, whether the missing corner should be sky or wall.

Pay a person when the damage is structural. Large tears, missing areas, mould that has eaten into the paper. Also when this is the only photo of that person, or when it will be printed large and framed. Use automated tools when the photo is intact and the problems are on the surface. That covers most photos.

Storing the original afterwards

• Keep paper prints flat, in a paper or polyester sleeve, in a box that is not in a loft or a basement. Heat and damp do the damage, not light alone.
• Do not use PVC sleeves. They give off gas and stain the print.
• Label the back in pencil, not pen. Ink soaks through and shows on the front.
• Keep two digital copies. One on a drive you own, one somewhere else. A cloud account only counts if you can get the file back without the service.
• Write down who is in the photo while someone still remembers. A restored photo with no names is just a nice picture of strangers.