Restore your old photos

Remove signs of wear and tear, and add colour to monochrome prints

- George Cairns

In part one of this feature last month (#MF407), we explored a variety of hardware and software solutions to rescue

old analogue prints, slides or negatives and give them a new lease of life as digital format files. Being digitised is the first step to rescuing an old photo as much more work needs to be done to restore it to its original look. Indeed, you can even improve on the original by adding extra properties such as colour and facial detail courtesy of artificial intelligence (AI) tools as we’ll demonstrate.

This tutorial features a grainy old photo from an early 20th century family album. The picture suffers from faded tones due to the passage of time. There are also scuffs from handling that have scraped off surface details and a diagonal crease across the soldier on the right. The lens used to take the original photo has created a soft focus look, so the faces lack definition. Also, because we snapped the original using an iPhone it suffers from keystone distortion (where the photo’s vertical edges converge towards the top of the frame).