Vivid–Pix Restore
Bring faded memories back to life
$49.99 From Vivid–Pix, vivid-pix.com
Needs OS X 10.7 and above
Thanks to our ever–present iPhone it’s a quick and easy task to snap and share colorful, high–quality images of our daily activities with friends, family, and social media followers. However, many of us have collections of hard-copy photos that are lingering unseen between the pages of old albums or hidden in boxes in the basement. To help your old analogue photos compete with today’s pristine digital prints you’ll need to boost their faded colors and restore washed-out contrast. Fortunately, apps such as Vivid–Pix Restore can give venerable prints a new lease of life on our social media feeds.
Restore has a clean and simple workspace. After clicking on the Select Image button you can choose a setting from the Restore Options drop–down to suit your digitized image’s particular needs. Options include “Faded Print or Slide” and “Digital or Cell Phone Camera.” You are then presented with
a grid of nine preview thumbnails showing a range of contrast adjustments. Click on a preview to start your restoration with that particular look. This nine–image preview grid works in a similar way to the preview grids you find in Photoshop Elements when editing colors and tones in that app’s Quick Edit mode. The preview thumbnails for each drop–down setting produced similar results using our test images.
After clicking on a thumbnail you’re presented with a before and after version of the image. A collection of sliders enables you to rotate the image and tweak the contrast and lightness settings applied by your chosen preset. If the scanned shot suffers from a cold (blue) or warm (orange) color cast then you can counteract it using a red/cyan color slider. Magenta and green tints can be reduced using a second slider. Once a restored print’s colors look more accurate you can boost its color saturation using the Vividness slider and click a sharpen button to create a print with more punch.
A selection of preset crop sizes (such as 6 x 4) helps you draw a crop window to remove background objects outside the scanned picture’s edge. Clicking on the Save Vivid–Pix button pops the restored version into the same folder as the original image in a .jpg format ready for sharing on social media.
Unlike the more expensive Adobe Photoshop Elements, Restore is lacking some advanced restoration features such as the ability to remove stains and dust spots on prints. Although Restore can rotate and crop a shot it can’t counteract perspectival distortion caused by capturing a print at an angle via your iPhone. However, Restore does a fine job of quickly sprucing up the colors, tones and sharpness of your precious analogue photos and its toolset should be easy for the photo–fixing novice to master.
THE BOTTOM LINE. Vivid–Pix Restore helps you quickly enhance old pictures with ease. GEORGE CAIRNS