How to Restore Your Old Photos

How to Restore Your Old Photos

Old family photos have without a doubt a special place in our hearts. We all have moments when we feel like taking a trip down memory lane and looking at ourselves in different stages and moments of our lives, from early childhood to class field trips and birthday parties.

The bad news is that, since they date from back in the day, our vintage prints have inevitably suffered a certain amount of damage. The good news is that, even if they are faded, scratched or torn, they can still be brought back to a very good condition through photo restoration tools.

With the aid of image editing software you can rescue your old family prints and give them a new digital life by fixing the brightness and contrast, repairing the color, by cropping away unwanted elements like torn edges or performing other useful edits.

Now, depending on the number of photos you wish to restore, you can opt for a one-by-one editing tool or a batch processing one like BatchPhoto that will allow you to apply your edits to multiple pictures at the same time. The later alternative will go great if you have a massive collection of old photos and wish to bring them back to life without losing too much time.

Just follow these steps and you’ll be able to restore your vintage analog prints in an efficient manner.

Scan your photos

First things first. In order to allow our editing software to perform its “healing” touches and rejuvenate our old photos, we need to archive them digitally. The best tool to use for the job is a scanner. So go ahead, scan your pictures and save them to a popular photo file format like TIFF or PNG. We don’t recommend JPG because it’s a lossy image format, so it loses image data with each consecutive save.

Crop the unnecessary edges

One of the first things we’re interested in is to obtain clean, new edges. So open BatchPhoto and from Step 2 select Add Filter > Crop. Now, with this tool selected, simply remove the edges of the scanned picture. Of course, the Crop tool can be used to fix other problems as well in case there are certain areas of the image you want to crop away.

How to Restore Your Old Photos

Fine-tune the contrast

It’s quite likely that more of your photos have suffered, under the ravage of time, various unaesthetic changes. In case you’re dealing with images with faded tones you can improve their overall appearance by boosting the contrast. Just go to Step 2, select Add Filter > Contrast, then move back and forth the Contrast and Lightness sliders until you’re happy with the way the picture looks.

Lighten dark shots

It can happen to us even today, with all the knowledge and gear placed at our disposal, to shoot dark, underexposed photos. Let alone a couple of decades ago, when the sources of information were considerably fewer and technology hadn’t made advances like in our present time.

But there’s no need to worry, because one of the photo restoration techniques refers exactly to brightening old, dark photos. So with BatchPhoto already opened, go to Step 2 of the program, select Add Filter > Brightness and just slide the Lightness and Gamma to the right until you get the desired result.

Remove yellow tint

The yellow tint – we’ve all seen it on many pictures and we all agree it’s quite unpleasant. Fortunately, we can get rid of it and hence properly balance the colors in our images. One way of removing the yellow tint is to use the Hue/Saturation filter. While leaving the Hue slider the way it is, move the Saturation slider to your left to desaturate the image to a certain extent and the Lightness slider to your right to brighten it. Play around with them until you’re satisfied with the final aspect of the photo.

Thanks to modern photo restoration software, we can now restore and preserve old family photos that at one time seemed forever lost. Of course, some photographs will require more work than others if they are in worse shape, but it’s definitely worthwhile. You’ll restore great pictures and along with them you’ll also restore pieces and emotions of earlier days.

You can try BatchPhoto for free right now by downloading from here!