Ok guys; who wants to explain me how to repair old photos by photoshop? I wait your answers. Best regards.

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With Photoshop you can correct anything from color quality and tonal range to altering the composition and sharpening the overall quality of your picture.

By following these basic steps you can make improvements to your picture:

- Make sure that yor scan quality is best for your images use.
- The image should be cropped to the size you intend it to be when it is finished.
- Adjust the contrast and tonal range of your picture.
- Alter or remove any color contrasts.
- Work on specific parts of your image to enhance highlights, middle tones, shadows and desaturated colors.
- And sharpen the focus of your image overall.

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If your photos are ripped, put them together with some space between them and scan them. Then, you can remove the white parts and put the pieces together.
Since old photos lose a lot of their details, you may have to fake some of the lost information. You can copy a pattern from one part of the picture to another with the Healing Tool and the Patch Tool. When you adjust the color levels, do it by section by section so that the picture won't be too dark at some parts or too bright on other parts.

It'd be great if you had a more specific question, though... These are just some general guidelines.

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Upload one of your old photos that needs to be retouched/repaired and I'll repair them for ya, and make a tutorial also, posted here, how I did it, so you can easily replicate it later on other photos...

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What exactly needs to be changed ?

make a list of the problems in the picture. This could be elements you'd like removed (or replaced), color adjustments, lighting adjustments ...

You can then seek a tutorial for each of these problems. A great portal for photoshop tutorials is http://www.good-tutorials.com/ , however at the moment it seems to be down so I can't hand you a few of them relevant to your case right now.

To the left you'll find a bar with categories such as photo retouching.

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Could you describe your problem to us for us to help you. Photoshop is a great program to revitalize a picture and even make it look better. But certain photos might be a challenge to fix, depending on its condition.

Some of the many different ways you can fix a photo is through its filters, and image editing options in the tool bar.

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For my photos, I usually use the clone tool along with the healing brush for faces, and sometimes the dust and scratches filter. Works rather well actually. I'll see if I can make a tutorial as well.

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Really bad photo problem
Photoshop: Teach Me How To Repair Old Photos

Replying to finaldesign
Finaldesign...
You said that you would be willing to demonstrate the repair of a damaged photo. I have what I think is a really tough problem, especially for someone who is not an artist: a photo that has been partially defaced with a colored marker (partially transparent). Repair would be easy enough if the marks were very small, but in this case the offending color covers a substantial portion of the portrait. If you can give me some clues about an effective approach to this I would be enormously grateful. Sorry...I don't know how to upload the file to this site. Can you tell me how to do that also? Thanks.

-reply by Lowell

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In the case of restoring old photos, the two best tools for the job are the clone tool, and the healing brush. The clone tool is good for fixing big blotches of solid areas or patterns, while the healing brush can smooth out those little blips or blotches that can occur. (it's also good for removing pimples from portraits).

When restoring old photographs, you want to scan them in at a very high resolution, because the more pixels you have to work with, the better. I'd say 300-600 dpi would be good, You can always shrink, but you really loose quality if you try making a smaller picture bigger.

Then read up on how to use the healing brush to eliminate scratches and rips and folds. Grayscaling and adjusting the white levels also helps if you need contrast.

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