How To Restore Old Or Damaged Photos

Photographs can take you back to the best moments of life. If you have print photos that have not aged well, you may be thinking about how to restore them. Back when all photos were taken with film in a camera with a roll of film in for processing and printing.

Then such photos were picked up and preserved in photo albums. But these printed photos have a framed life since the quality of the photo paper and ink wasn’t nearly as good as it is today.

That’s why, when you come across these old photos, you may find those ink faded, the edges rimmed, and stains and scratches covering up a pretty piece of remembrance. Photo restoration services get you covered in such a situation.

 Tips on what you can do to restore an old or damaged photograph.

• Digitizing photographs.

Rather than trying to restore a photo, digitize it. You’ll need to scan the photo or have some services do that for you. Once you have the image as a digital file, the image can be cropped, straightened, or rotated. Color adjustments and fixing of damages can be made.

Once you have the digital file, you can print the image and frame it, if you want. The digitized photos can be restructured the way you want.

• Restoring photographs differently.

Once the image is digitized, and if you are a person who loves to keep the physical copy of photographs you may want to manually restore the actual old photographs. For this, you’ll first need to clean the images. Wear rubber gloves, and remove the dirt with a soft brush or soft-bristled toothbrush.

If your old photos are stuck together, don’t pull them apart. Instead, soak them in distilled water, where the coating of gelatin will soften to aid in the separation without further damaging the photo.

If the photo is stuck in a frame, you can remove the glass by gently heating the image using a hairdryer. Hold the dryer about 5 inches from the back of the print and after a few minutes, lift one of the corners of the image to begin gradually peeling it out.

But this form of restoration is only helpful if you are careful enough to do it. There are many DIY tricks to restore your photographs that have a probability of not serving the purpose. Try it on certain damaged pictures which don’t serve a great value, say a blurred photograph. Then try it on the photograph you want to get restored.

• Get professional services.

Another great option is to hire a photo restoration professional or agency who can restore yanked, stained, or otherwise damaged photos. They can even digitally enhance it as well. Numerous services are photo restoration agencies to give your old and damaged photographs new life.

Frequently older images are one of a kind so it can be extremely heartbreaking to find out that they have been damaged. Photographs can go through a lot of damage through years of disclosure to humidity, water, sunlight, and dirt.

Sometimes even storing photographs incorrectly can end up in damage. Knowing your option for services in restoring photographs, learning how to store them from home can help ensure the term of a photograph for the generation to come.