Fix old family photos

Digitise your old family photographs and give them that much-needed repair job with the help of Photoshop

By digitising your old photographs, you can give them a whole new lease of life! Take this image, which was orginally shot in the late 1930s. The surrounding frame has become damaged and the image has a few scratches and faded. To fix this, we used a few simple tricks in Photoshop and managed to boost the overall effect.

When it comes to scanning in your old treasured photographs, a flatbed scanner will do the job. We scanned our image in at a resolution of 300 dots per inch because we wanted to make prints of the scanned photo, but if you intend to view the image on-screen, a resolution of 72 or 96dpi is sufficient. The higher the resolution you choose, the larger the resulting file will be – and if you don’t have a powerful computer, it will take much longer to work on in Photoshop. This can be frustrating – sometimes more isn’t necessarily better!