PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.

How to Restore Old Pictures With Photoshop

It's easy to fix up old family photos to get rid of cracks, spots, and color degradation using Photoshop’s Photo Restoration tool. We show you how to use it.

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

Some of your most treasured images could be in the back of drawers or in a box in the basement. They’re printed photos from the days before smartphones doubled as digital cameras. Since those old photographs are physical, not digital, they’re subject to wear, tear, and decay. Colors change, cracks appear, and spots mar the images. Adobe Photoshop now can use its AI smarts to do remarkable photo restoration when you make digital copies of those photos and bring them back to their former lifelike glory.

Photoshop now includes a Photo Restoration filter, which I show you how to use below. Impressive as it is, it sometimes only gets you part of the way to fully restoring and optimizing damaged photos. I also show you how to use other Photoshop tools to get to photo restoration nirvana, as well as how to easily convert a black-and-white picture to color.

Despite Photoshop’s automatic AI power, you still need to put in a little extra effort to get a satisfying result. You can pay for a professional photo restoration service, but it's not too hard to get your old photos looking better than ever using Photoshop all by yourself.


1. Scan the Photo

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

To work on an image in Photoshop, you need a digital file, so start by scanning the old photo. That linked article gives you the full skinny on how to go about getting the best scans possible. Most printers these days are also scanners, and many offer high-resolution scanning. You can get a decent multifunction printer for less than $200. More serious photography buffs will want a dedicated photo scanner. If you only have negatives, you need a special film scanner—see our list of  the best photo scanners.

To summarize the steps: Wipe off any dust with a soft microfiber cloth, make sure the scanner bed is clean, and scan at the highest resolution possible. A good option is to save as a 600dpi TIFF file, though you can also work with a high-quality JPG. Then again, if someone sends you a photo file that’s not all that high-quality, you have to work with what you have.


2. Open the Image in Photoshop and Create a Duplicate Layer

Drag the background layer onto the New Layer button, or you can right-click and choose Duplicate Layer from the context menu while the cursor is on the background layer. The purpose is to make all your edits on a higher layer, while the original scanned image remains untouched in the background layer.


3. Open the Restore Photo Filter

With the duplicate layer selected, go to the Filter menu, select Neural Filters, and a panel appears with all of Photoshop's AI filters. You need to slide the switch next to the filter’s name to enable it. Move the Photo Enhancement slider back and forth to see its minimal and maximal effect. It improves both the lighting and the color. In the case of my test photo, it changed the sepia of the original to a more neutral black and white. I found that turning Enhance Face all the way up sharpened the image too much. The Restore Photo Neural filter is still labeled as beta, but I didn’t have any stability trouble with it, aside from it failing to use my graphics card (even though Photoshop settings showed it as enabled) and taking about 15 seconds to complete.

Our sample photo (shown in Step 1 above) has a big scratch in the upper left. The filter’s Scratch Reduction slider is off by default. I tried moving it to the right all the way, and the AI was able to identify and completely remove the scratch! The tool can take some time to finish its work, depending on your computer’s graphics hardware. A progress bar gives you an idea how long it will take.

Here’s the result using the Photo Restoration Neural Filter alone:

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

The photo is sharper and better lighted, and not only is the big scratch gone, but the spots are, too. Right-click the photo above and open it in a new tab to get the complete detail. One quibble is that the filter thought that the shiny buttons on the jacket were dust spots, so they’re gone in the result. There’s an alternative way to make corrections that may avoid losing the buttons, which I cover next.


4. Alternative Option: Healing Brush and Healing Spot Tools

Photoshop’s Healing Brush tool give you a more targeted way to fix the scratch, and the Spot Healing Brush does the same for the spots. When I use these tools instead of the Photo Restoration filter, I get to keep the jacket buttons in the sample photo. To use this method, apply the Photo Restoration filter’s lighting and sharpness corrections without enabling Scratch Reduction. The video above shows where those tools are, and the result from using them after Photo Restoration. You can see that the jacket buttons remain. When you use the Healing Brush, you need to select a source area for the fill using Alt-click, and you may need to go over the scratch more than once. Using the Spot Healing Brush is a simple matter of clicking on the offending spots.


5. Bonus Step: Colorize the Photo

(Credit: Jill Duffy/Adobe)

To bring the image truly into the 21st century, you may want color, though black and white photos have their own special charm. Though colorizing photos had for years been a painstaking process, Adobe has another whizzbang AI tool up its sleeve for this. Head to Neural Filters, and once again you have to move the slider next to the tool name for it to work. Though it correctly rendered the grass and skin tones in the test photo, the color was oversaturated. You can bring down the saturation with a slider in the panel. And if you really want to put some time in, you can manually add color, though I found it hard going.

You can make standard photo adjustments, too, like editing the brightness and contrast, denoising the image, and smoothing it out with Photoshop tools. But we’re concerned with restoring rather than improving the original photo. After some blurring, dodging, burning, and more healing brush to add color to the hand on the left, I got the image to the point shown below. A true professional photo retoucher might get an even better result, but this one is at least far more engaging than the damaged original.

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

6. Export the Restored Image

Since creating layers means your photo file is in Photoshop’s PSD format, you need to go to File > Export As… and choose JPG so you can share it easily with contacts who may not have a copy of Photoshop. I suggest the highest quality JPG at the original resolution of the scanned image. You can get to the export menu with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Alt-Shift-W.

(Credit: Jill Duffy/Adobe)

For more photo editing tips, see our list of the best Photoshop plug-ins or the best Photoshop alternatives. And find out which photo-printing service delivers the best quality prints.

About Michael Muchmore