How do I restore a faded or damaged old photograph?

Restoration is a copying job followed by an editing job. Almost everything that goes wrong happens because someone worked on the original, or because the scan was poor and every later step was fighting it.

Safety

What you'll need

• A flatbed scanner, or a camera and even light
• A soft brush or blower for surface dust
• Editing software with a healing or clone tool
• Acid-free storage for the original (optional)

Step by step

1. Handle the original as little as possible.Hold prints by the edges, ideally with clean dry hands or cotton gloves. Skin oils cause staining that appears years later. Never write on the back with a ballpoint or use adhesive tape or paper clips.
2. Clean only the surface dust.A soft brush or a blower, working gently across the surface. Do not use water, cleaning fluid, alcohol or a cloth — old emulsions lift and dissolve, and the damage is instant and permanent.
3. Capture it properly.A flatbed scanner at 600 dpi or more for a print, higher for anything small you intend to enlarge, with dust removal and automatic correction turned off so you get an honest file. For negatives and slides you need a scanner with a transparency unit, or a camera with a macro lens and a light source behind them.
4. Photograph it instead if there is no scanner.Lay the print flat, light it evenly from two sides at forty-five degrees to avoid reflections, mount the camera parallel to the print, and use the self-timer. Keep the camera square on — perspective correction on a scanned document loses detail.
5. Work on a copy, and keep the raw scan.Save the untouched scan and never overwrite it. Every restoration decision should be reversible, and in twenty years the tools will be better than they are now.
6. Correct tone and colour first.Set the black and white points so the picture has a proper range again, then remove the overall cast. Colour prints from the mid-twentieth century commonly fade towards magenta or yellow because one dye layer degrades faster than the others, and correcting the dominant cast recovers most of the image.
7. Repair damage from largest to smallest.Tears and missing corners first, using clone and patch tools sampling from matching areas; then creases; then spots and dust. Working the other way round means redoing small repairs when you fix a large one.
8. Rebuild missing detail conservatively.Faces and hands are what people look at, so spend the time there. Reconstructing a missing background is easy and reconstructing a missing face is invention — be clear with yourself and with the family about which you have done.
9. Decide how much age to leave.Complete removal of every mark often produces a strangely sterile image that no longer looks like a photograph from its time. Removing damage while leaving grain, tone and the character of the print is usually the better result.
10. Store the original properly afterwards.Flat, in an acid-free paper or polyester enclosure, in a cool dry dark place — not a loft, not a garage, not a basement. Heat and humidity swings do far more damage than time. Keep the digital copy backed up in at least two places.

Tips

• Scan a group of small prints in one pass and separate them afterwards. Most scanning software will split them automatically.
• Photographs stuck to glass in a frame are a specialist job. Water and pulling will destroy the emulsion; leave them and copy through the glass at an angle that avoids reflection instead.
• Note who is in the picture, and when and where it was taken, in the file's metadata or in a text file beside it. The identification is more irreplaceable than the image.

Common mistakes

• Trying to clean a print with a damp cloth — Old emulsions soften and lift when wet, and the image comes off on the cloth. Surface dust only, with a brush or blower.
• Scanning with automatic correction and dust removal on — Automatic settings guess at the colour and remove what they think is dust, which on a grainy old print can mean removing real detail. Scan flat and honest, then correct deliberately.
• Restoring the original rather than a copy — Any physical intervention on an original is irreversible and reduces its value and its longevity. The original is the archive; the digital file is the working copy.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask