recently my daughter gave me an old photo that she wanted restoring this is how it looked when
I photographed the original so you can see how faded it is most of the time you don't
need specialist tools to restore old photos like this Affinity photo and Photoshop have everything
you need before I could start restoring this old photo I first needed to capture it digitally you
can do this by photographing it but it's much easier if you have access to a flatbed scanner
here's what the photo looked like when I scanned it and saved it as a 16-bit tiff image now I'm
using a 16-bit tiff format rather than the 8-Bit format to ensure that I don't create any banding
of the tones when I start to fix the fading next if we look at the size of the document using the
resize command you can see that it's a little over 11 inches by 9 inches this is larger than I
intend for the finished image what the additional size gives me is some room to crop the image if
you look closely at the scan you you can see the edges of the mount that it was glued to to crop
the image select the crop tool from the toolbar this displays a grid over the image which I can
then resize to select the area I want to keep when the crop is in position I click the apply
button by the way in Affinity photo the crop tool is non-destructive if I select it again and click
the reveal option in the toolbar you can see the edges that I cropped away it's then still possible
to adjust the crop if you need to the next step in the photo restoration is to correct the photos
contrast and remove the sepia tint a good method for doing this is by adding the levels adjustment
to the image in the dialog select the red channel in the drop down to adjust it we now need to drag
the black level on the left so that it meets the start of the red histogram then do the same with
the white level on the right dragging it to meet the right edge of the histogram when you've done
that switch to the green Channel and repeat the steps first move the Black Level to meet
the left edge of the histogram and then the white level to meet the other end finally switch to the
blue Channel and set the black and white levels to meet each side of the blue Channel histogram the
adjustment that we've just made does two things first it sets the white balance which removes
the discoloring of the photo secondly it corrects the contrast to remove the fading having done that
we're then able to see any damage to the photo that we still need to restore let's zoom into
200 magnification so that we can see the detail clearly to restore this photo I'm going to work
on cleaning up the lady first to do this I'll add a new empty layer to the top of the image and I'll
use this to apply my repair to make the repair I'm going to be using the Affinity photo in painting
brush tool you'll find this in the tools palette on the left of the interface it's grouped with
several other repair tools so one of the these may be shown if you can't see this brush just click
the bottom right of the icon to show all the tools in the group you can then click the in painting
brush to select it now before we use this we want to change some settings in the toolbar first is
the drop down which we want to set to sample the current layer and below this allows us to make
the repair onto the new layer that we added the other thing is that I like to use the brush with
the opacity and flow both set to 100 percent but I add the hardness set to about 80 percent to give
the brush a slightly soft Edge these settings seem to work well when restoring old photos and
they don't remove as much of the photo detail after applying the settings use a very small
brush to paint off with the dust spots for small spots click on the spot and the impacting brush
will remove it for larger marks click and drag to paint over the area you want to repair then
when you release the mouse button it supplies the fix the secret to doing this well is to
work slowly only fixing small areas at a time be patient and don't try to paint over too large an
area you may also find that you need to paint over some areas a couple of times to make a convincing
repair here's what the photo looked like when I've removed all the spots and marks from the lady if I
hide the layer you can see everything that's been removed now earlier I mentioned that when I made
this scan it was larger than I needed part of the reason was to allow me to crop The Unwanted edges
away but there's another benefit which is that it makes it easier to see the dust to remove it
then later when I reduce the final image after restoration any remaining dust becomes too small
to see so far I've only removed the dust from the lady but there's a lot of marks on the rest of the
photo I don't really want to spend a lot of time removing these because the rest of the scene isn't
that important fortunately if Affinity photo has a filter that I can use to quickly remove
unwanted dust in the layers menu I'll select New Life filter layer followed by noise and then Dust
and scratches you can then see the new life filter layer attached to the pixel layer where we've been
applying the repair this means that it will only affect that layer but we don't want that we want
it to apply to the rest of the image to do this click and drag the filter removing it from the
layer that it's attached to and then drop it at the top of the other layers now I can adjust the
radius and tolerance sliders to remove a lot of the Dust spots the only problem now is that the
filter is affecting the woman in the photo as well to fix this we can add a layer mask to the
live filter layer then using the regular brush tool set to Black we can then paint over the
woman to protect her from the effect of the filter when you do this be sure that you have the layer
mask selected and aren't painting directly onto the photo it also helps to have your opacity and
flow set to 100 as well as the hardness this makes it easier to paint over the woman and not spill
over into the background notice how the detail returns to the woman as I'm painting if I turn
off the filter layer you can see the difference that he's making to the background now we just
have some blue smudges and a few spots to deal with the easy way to repair the killer smudges
is by applying a black and white adjustment layer to the image having done that I can then see a few
more areas that I want to fix I'll therefore add a new empty layer and reselect the impainting brush
I can then paint over the problem areas to apply a repair to the new layer now in some areas you may
see problems where the dust and scratches filter is removing shadows and highlights to prevent this
re-select the brush tool and then paint on the mask attached to that layer this will fix the
problem but in some cases you may find it reveals dust again if it does select the top pixel layer
and then using the in painting brush tool paint over the dust to remove it we're now removing most
of the problems with the filter and then cleaning up selected areas where it's not doing such a good
job now that we've repaired all the areas of the photo I can export the finished image the format
I'm going to use for the exported jpeg I'm also going to resize the image to be eight inches wide
when I export it which is 2 400 pixels and here's the result now one of the problems you might
encounter when scanning old photos to restore is that the scans appear solid when this happens the
best software I've flown for fixing the problems is topaz sharpen AI which I discuss in this
video it's a great one to watch next thanks for watching today and I hope you found this video
helpful don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already I'll see you soon for another video