How to Restore Old Photos and Bring Them Back to Life

Old photos are restored by repairing physical damage, correcting faded color and contrast, and optionally colorizing black-and-white images, either with software or by a person editing the scan by hand. Most common damage can be fixed: scratches, creases, water spots, fading, and small tears. Heavily missing areas are harder and sometimes need a skilled retoucher to rebuild. Here's what's realistic, and how to take a restored photo one step further by bringing it into motion.

What can actually be fixed

Most prints in a family shoebox suffer from the same handful of problems, and nearly all are repairable:

• Fading and color shift, where the photo has turned yellow, orange, or pink
• Surface scratches, dust, and spots
• Creases and small tears
• Low contrast and a washed-out look
• Missing corners or edges, within reason

What's hard is rebuilding a face that's largely gone, or inventing detail that was never captured. A good restoration repairs what's there rather than inventing what isn't.

Step 1: Get a clean scan first

Restoration is only as good as the scan. Scan at 600 dpi, or photograph the print in flat daylight near a window with no glare. A clean, high-resolution starting file gives the restoration far more to work with. Our step-by-step guide to making a video from old photos covers scanning in more detail.

Step 2: Repair damage and correct color

Work in stages. Remove dust and scratches first, then fix creases and tears, then correct the overall color and contrast. Restoring color last means you're correcting a clean image rather than fighting the damage and the color shift at once.

Step 3: Colorize black-and-white photos

Colorizing a black-and-white photo makes the people in it feel present in a way the original never did. Skin tones, clothing, and backgrounds are added based on what's realistic for the era. Done with restraint, it's the step that makes relatives gasp.

Step 4: Bring the photo into motion

A restored photo can be animated with gentle movement, a slow zoom or a subtle parallax that separates the subject from the background, so a still image feels like a held moment rather than a flat scan. Set several restored photos to music in sequence and you have a memory reel.

The shortcut: let someone do it for you

Restoration by hand takes patience, and the trickier prints need real skill. If you'd rather see the result before doing the work, the free First Look restores and colorizes three of your photos so you can judge the quality. The full Everstory Memory Reel restores a whole collection and turns it into a film.