How to fix vintage photos

Erm, still haven't sorted out photos from my mum's party on Saturday, but I can share a photo of the surprise I made for her: little 'mini-mags', with a cover design similar to 1960s Jackie magazine. I got her to send me some old pictures but didn't say why, and then spent a bit of time fixing them up in the morning before work, then put them into a little magazine and paid Digiprint to print them out. It occurred to me that it might be useful to other people to know how I fixed the photos, as lots of us have old family pictures that have got a bit battered. So, here goes...

Scan your photos

Before you can tweak your photo, you need to digitise it. Scanning is ideal, but if you're careful you might be able to photograph an old photo instead – just make sure your camera is completely square-on to the camera or your image will be distorted.

Digital images are made up of dots. When you look at them on a screen like you are now, 72 dots per inch is fine. However, for printing 300 dots per inch is ideal. This means if you want to print your fixed image out at the same size as the original, you'll need to scan it at at least 300dpi. That's what I did on our office scanner, though that also offered the chance to scan at 600dpi, so I could have enlarged the original. You can always reduce the dpi later and get good results, whereas you can't enlarge a too-small digital image without suffering a lack of image quality.

Crop your image
Open your scan in your preferred software. I used Photoshop CS6, but as I'm showing you a fairly quick and easy way to fix photos you should have a version of the tools I use in whatever software you have. Your scan or photo will probably need tidying up at the edges, so use the Crop tool to trim to the edges of the photo. If the edges are particularly ragged, and there's nothing of interest there, you could crop in a tiny bit further and trim the worst of the damage off.

Clone in the damaged areas

Before, during, after.

Your software should have something like a Clone Stamp tool. This enables you to copy part of the image and paste it over another area. It's important to match the damaged area as closely as possible, so with the Clone tool active I alt-clicked on an undamaged area very close to the damage to sample it, then made sure my tool was small enough to cover only the damaged bit, and copied the undamaged area over the tear.

Cloning is very easy in simple areas, such as the flat black area here, but trickier when texture, shade and even colour come into play. You can't just sample one area and cover the damage with it, you'll need to keep resampling to ensure that your repair matches its surroundings.

It's also much more complicated to fill in large areas of damage as you may find yourself having to 'draw in' stuff. For most of the repairs to this photo of mum and her friend Doreen, I was simply covering over cracks, but the cardigan actually had an area missing. To repair this, I duplicated an undamaged part of the cardigan and followed the line of the knitting. I haven't got it perfect, but the result is less obtrusive than the rip. Had this level of damage been affecting a face, I'd have thought long and hard before doing much work on it, and I'd probably have left most of it alone. (We all saw what happened when that Spanish lady tried to fix a painting in her local church, yes? It's easy to go too far.) Sometimes, leaving something alone is the best solution.

Anyway, that's how easy it is to repair a damaged photo. You only really need a couple of tools and you can restore someone's memories, or allow a treasured image to be passed on to future generations.