Restore old print photos with free software

When you want to revisit an old digital photo, you can simply scroll through your past social media posts or open your favorite storage app. But what about those physical prints from your film camera days—are they still filling up old albums and boxes in the basement? If so, they're probably looking a little worse for wear. Once you digitize these pictures, you can harness modern-day software to restore them to their former glory.

This guide will offer some free techniques for bringing your print pics to digital life, but we won't cover every photo problem. That said, you should be able to adapt these methods to tackle your specific situation, or apply the tools we recommend to experiment with your own fixes.

First of all, you'll need to create digital versions of your physical photos and put them on your computer. Either upload them with a scanner, or in a pinch, set up some good lighting and snap them with a high-quality smartphone camera. Once you have the scanned files, duplicate them and keep the originals separate while you tweak the copies. That way, if you make an editing error, you can always start over from scratch.

Need to color-correct a scanned image? You don't have to shell out for a monthly subscription for Adobe Photoshop. Free web app Pixlr offers a lot of the same tools, and you can use it right inside your browser. That means it works across Windows and macOS too.

Once you load up the web interface and open an image, Pixlr offers various tricks to bring back faded or discolored photos. Start with the Auto levels option on the Adjustment menu. On the same menu, you'll see Brightness & Contrast sliders for changing the look of your image. Drag the sliders from one end to the other to see the changes in real time.

Read More at:
https://www.popsci.com/restore-old-print-photos#page-2

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