Back in the day, there were no memory cards or cloud storage for people to back up their photos. People of those days had to get their camera roll photos printed and then save them in an album so the next generation could see those photos. Unfortunately, these photographs have a fixed lifespan because the paper quality and ink used weren’t as good as the quality of modern paper. It gets damaged and doesn’t look that good after some years.
In modern times, restoring a photo is not that hard, and don’t worry if you have never restored a picture before; I got you, my man. I am going to tell you how to restore photos. In this seven step tutorial, we are going to restore the image in the best photo restoration software, Photoshop.
7 Steps To Restore Photos in Photoshop
First Step: Make a Digital Copy
First, grab your old photo and make a digital copy of that photo. You can use any scanner app or take an image from your phone and scan it with a mobile app. Just make sure you get a good high-quality copy of your photo that will be easy to restore.
Second Step: Open Digital Copy in Photoshop
After making a digital copy, open that in Photoshop. Before starting the restore process, You need to make sure that your image is neat and correctly oriented. You can achieve this by using features like crop, straighten and rotate. When you have a clean image, go to the next step.
Third Step: Repair the tears
If your photo is pulled into extra pieces. You can smoothly repair these images in Photoshop. Just Use the lasso tool to pick each part and copy-paste them into individual layers. After that, put all the parts together. Make a new layer and use the tool Clone Stamp to hide missing pieces.
Fourth Step: Remove Dust and Scratches
Find Noise Option. Under the Noise option, click on Dust & Scratches.
Next, open a new window and raise the Radius and Threshold levels. Do adjustments until your photo looks clean. If there are yet several flaws left, make a new layer, use the spot-healing brush, and paint over those flaws. Then use the Noise Reduction tool until your image looks sharp and natural.
Fifth Step: Improve Tone
To restore faded Color, you need to do this: In the adjustments bar, you will find three options Auto Tone, Auto Color, and Auto Contrast. These tools will give you perfect results automatically, and you don’t need to do it manually. This is what makes these tools my favorite to use in the whole process.
Sixth Step: Color The Image (Optional)
This step is optional, but doing it will give your image a final touch.
There are so many techniques to do it; you can choose what you like:
- This technique is relatively similar to painting over a real photo. Make a solid color adjustment layer for all the parts of your photo you like to paint, then modify the blending mode to Color, so the components of the actual photo stay visible.
Take the help of a brush to paint over the portion of the photo you want to color. Shift to a smaller brush size if you’re painting tiny areas. Remember to add a different layer for each part of the photo you’re painting, so you can quickly remove or make adjustments.
- This is the easiest method in all the ways to Color and is called the Curve adjustment layer. Select the shade you want on another window for curve adjustment, and then paint with a brush.
Last Step: Save the Image
This is the most important and easiest step above all. Once you are satisfied with your work and happy with the final image, just save it in any of your favorite image extensions. Finally, That’s how you will get your old vintage photo into a modern appearance.
Tips To Get Your Restored Image Quickly and Efficiently
- It will be easy to restore if you have a graphics tablet. It will give you more control when you are painting.
- Learn all the shortcuts to cut your restoration process.
- Research before restoring an old vintage photo to see how it should look and how other people are doing it.
Conclusion:
Restoring an old photo is like bringing that moment back to life, and it is heartwarming. It was hard to restore an image in the old days, but in today’s world, it is a task that a ten-year-old boy can do; it’s that easy. In this article, we gave you a full tutorial on how to restore your photos in photoshop. It is so easy, and you can do it quickly; you just need photoshop on your pc. Now, grab an old photo of your family and start the restoring process.
