How to Restore Old Photos Using Photoshop

Restoring older photos can be challenging to do. I have done over 20,000 so far, with many more to go.

My collection is of 35mm slides. My grandfather took photos of mills, covered bridges, and other historical structures, the dates when these photos were taken go back to the late 1960's. I have boxes of slides that needed digitalized, and restored, it is an overwhelming task. Not only am I responsible for scanning the photos, but also making them as flawless as possible.

First thing that you need to restore a photo is a good high DPI scan of it. You want to scan the image in as high DPI as possible. You can always reduce the size once you have it scanned, but can not increase it. Since I had so many to scan, I purchased a scanner just for 35mm slides, which can scan an image up to 4000 DPI. But for photos, scanning in at 300dpi which is what most home scanners scan at works just as well. You just won't be able to get bigger photos such as 20X27 inch. But most the time for family photos, 8x10's are about the biggest you will need. For slides you also want to get a good antistatic brush to remove all the dust from the film as you can. These can be purchased online at a good photo supply store.

Once the scans are done, the hard part starts of restoring the images. I use Adobe Photoshop to restore the photos. It took awhile to get used to using the program, but once I learned the program, it is the easiest and quickest for me. This is a powerful product to restore photos. It will adjust the colors, the color levels, and you can brighten and darken a photo if necessary. You can also crop photos to any size you want.

I use Polaroid dust and scratch remover which was a free download from Polaroid to remove any dust particles that was still on the slide. Scanning in at higher DPI's will show the dust particles that the naked eye doesn't see. The dust and scratch remover is a plug in for Adobe PhotoShop.