Elements to Restore and Repair Old Photos

Photographs are the best tool we have to relive our cherished memories and remember loved ones who are no longer with us. Unfortunately photographs don’t age well and over time their quality diminishes. Because photos are printed on paper they are often affected by things such as handling, light, moisture, dust, and scratches. Regrettably, these things can ruin our photos and prevent them from lasting through the generations.

Unfortunately many people have been faced with the question of what to do with photographs that are torn or have been ruined by moisture. Do you simply toss them in the trash and risk losing the memories they hold or do you spend loads of money to have the photo restored? Fortunately you don?t have to do either. You can use photo editing software to restore the photos to their original condition.

The first step to restoring your cherished photos is to create a digital image of them so you can then edit them using your computer. Converting them to a digital image is as easy as scanning them into your computer. Once you have scanned your photo you can then begin the photo editing process.

Once you have opened your photograph inside your photo editing program I recommend that you create a copy by clicking on the file menu and selecting save as to rename your photograph. I recommend this so that you have a backup image on the off chance that you make a mistake. Once you have done this vital step you can begin to edit your photo using a few of the tools available. The tools I will talk about are the ones in Adobe Elements.

Photo restoration doesn?t require any specialized training or specific skills. All the tools are easy to use and you will quickly become adept at them. The most common tools used in this process are the smudge, blur and sharpen tool.

I am going to give you a breakdown of each of the tools and how you can use them to restore your photographs. The smudge tool is helpful when you want to eliminate any scratches that are on the original photo. You can also use the smudge tool to remove any object in the background you wish to eliminate as well as correct photos that were not properly focused.

The next tool is the blur tool. This tool will allow you to add some tone to photos so they can appear darker than they originally did. This tool is very effective when you are working with photos that have deteriorated due to long periods of exposure to sunlight. So you will be able to restore the colour in your photos so it looks bright and attractive again.

The sharpen tool is the last, most commonly used tool in photo restoration. If any parts of the photo are blurred, whether it is in the original photo or from scanning it in, this tool will fix those bits.

Keep your cherished memories alive and well, restore them using Adobe Elements.

When I run courses on Photoshop, tools like the magic wand and the clone tools are usually the ones which everyone finds the easiest to start using because they give such immediate results. The Magic Wand is one of three tools in Photoshop which are dedicated to making selections. The Magic Wand works by selecting colours within the image adjacent and similar to any pixel that you click on. Pixels of dissimilar colour act as barriers to selection and so the selection ripples outwards from the point you click on.

As you can imagine, you will not normally completely select your intended subject with one click when you are using the magic wand to make selections. Typically, you will select part of the area that you want and you will then need to add and subtract from the selection, perhaps switching to the other selection tools from time to time. Photoshop offers you two ways of modifying a selection: you can either use modifier keys on you keyboard or activate the modifier icons on the options panel normally displayed below your menu bar.

To add more pixels to your selection, hold down the Shift key while clicking with the Magic Wand on a part of the image which is not yet selected. To subtract from the selection, hold down the Alt key and click on the part of the selection which you wish to deselect. The selection modifier icons are situated on the left of the options panel. There are four of them: new selection, add to selection, subtract from selection and select intersection. These icons effectively allow you to change selection mode on a permanent basis. Thus, for example, you could click on the second of the four icons when using the Magic Wand and click continually on different parts of a subject until it was completely selected.

A simple trick for selecting a subject against a uniform background such as a wall or the sky is to use the magic wand to select the background and then invert the selection by choosing Select – Inverse. A slight variation on this technique is to make a rough selection which completely encloses the subject as well some of the background and then to use the Magic Wand in subtract mode to remove the background from the selection.

You can control the number of pixels which the Magic Wand selects when you click on part of the image by changing a setting called tolerance. Tolerance determines how far a pixel can vary from the pixel that you click on and still be included in the selection. The default tolerance is 32 and the maximum is 255.