Back in the days of ordinary old film cameras, people didn’t have the luxury to save all their photographs to a memory card and back them up on a computer. In those days, you had to develop rolls of film, print photos, and store them safely in photo albums to ensure that you could enjoy the memories captured in each image for years to come.
Unfortunately, these printed photos had a limited life because the quality of the photo paper and ink used was not as good as the quality we use today. Over time, the damage will occur, leaving us with photo albums and boxes full of old, damaged photos with faded ink, ragged edges, and even a few scratches and smudges here and there.
Fortunately, recovering old photos is not that difficult. You just need to know how to do it!
How to Make Old Pictures Look New Using Photoshop?
To make your old pictures look new, here are some steps you can follow:
1. Scan Your Old Pictures
The first step is to scan the photo for a digital copy. You can use a regular photo scanner, take pictures using a digital camera, or use a scanner app on your smartphone. Whichever method you use, make sure it will produce a large, high-quality copy of the photo to make it easier to use.
2. Asses the Images
You need to open the picture that you want to recover in Photoshop. Assess the amount of work the images require. It’s a good idea to fix the whole image before moving on to specific areas of damage.
Then make a second copy of the image. You want to keep a copy of the original for reference, so you’ll be working on transforming the second copy.
3. Crop or Straighten the Images
Before you can start making any adjustments, make sure you’re working with a clean, adequately oriented image. If there’s any unwanted white space (or any space that shouldn’t be there), you can simply crop it all away.
You can also use the Crop menu to keep the image’s aspect ratio proportion if you’re printing an old photo. If your scanned image is slightly crooked, you can straighten it using the crop tool.
4. Make Necessary Adjustments to Your Image
There are two ways to do this step in Photoshop: adjust the colors of your image and repair the damaged parts. Old photos are usually faded, but if you want to improve the tone, color, contrast, and overall brightness of your picture, Photoshop can do that too.
Also Read: How to Retouch Image in Photoshop
There are basic adjustments like Brightness, Contrast, Exposure, and Vibrance, or slightly deeper adjustment tools like Curves and Levels. Depending on the state of your photo, the best thing to do is to play around with these various adjustment tools to get the tone, color, and contrast just right.
5. Apply Filter(s) to Reduce Noise
You can’t magically remove dust and scratches with the push of a button, and you have to do it manually. However, you can make the job easier by using Photoshop’s Filter function to reduce unwanted noises.
6. Save and Print
Once you are satisfied with the image, delete the unedited layer (original reference layer). After that, just save and print your photo.
Also Read: Get to Know Masking Photoshop Feature System
Those are the steps you can try to make old pictures look new that we can share with you. Now, if you still need help recovering your old photographs, you can try Dropicts. We provide you with various professional edits that you can try. For more information regarding our services, click here.
