Repair Your Old Photos

Make Damaged Prints Look Fresh Again With Key Restoration Techniques.

- Dave Stevenson

The beauty of digital storage is that you can make old photos instantly accessible, but simply setting aside a few days to hunker down with your scanner to produce a massive folder on your Mac of unsorted, unprocessed images is merely the modern day equivalent of a dusty old box in the attic. Taking a more focussed approach is key: scan important, one-of-a-kind shots, and make sure you tag the resultant files with a rough date and a few keywords so you can find them.

More than anything, digitising old photos is a chance to undo the ravages of time. Jobs such as restoring colour, removing tears and fixing water stains are all relatively simple, and we’ll walk you through how to perform these tasks effectively and invisibly, leaving you with fresh-looking, print-ready images free of the artefacts they picked up over the years.

For the purposes of this piece we’ll explain our examples using Photoshop, yet you’ll find many of its features, keyboard shortcuts and workings are replicated in Affinity Photo.

Your source material is the image you scan into your Mac. Scan your photos at the native resolution of your scanner at its highest colour count. Use the native file format of your image editor while you work – in Photoshop, that’s a PSD, while in Affinity Photo it’s the afphoto format. Apart from being lossless, using an image editor’s native format will do the best job of preserving layers and a history of your edits. Lossy formats like JPEG are best used when the fixing up is finished and you’re ready to print or share a photo online.

Using the spot healing brush