Keep Family Archives Alive

Simple photo touch-ups keep your memories crystal clear. Find out how here.

Most photographs suffer from the passage of time: They fade, crack, wrinkle, or tear. Fortunately, Photoshop Elements offers several tools to help keep your family archives alive and ready for another generation of viewing. You'll discover how easy it is when I demonstrate it for you.

To fix the old photo here, I used a combination of Photoshop Elements' dust & scratches filter, a selection tool, and the clone stamp tool.

(click thumbnails for full-size view)

I straightened and cropped the edges of the scan by using the straighten and crop command (Image>Rotate>Straighten and Crop). See it here.  

Then I used the crop tool to remove the black edges of the slide holder.

I applied auto levels to the cropped image to optimize the colors. See the difference here.

At a magnification level of 300 percent, I noticed the sky was filled with dust and scratches and other artifacts of age (seen here). 

As I scrolled around, I saw there were also moiri patterns caused by the scanning process. Glass against glass often causes a swirling pattern, called a moiri, to form. The old transparency was sandwiched between two pieces of glass. I selected the sky by using the lasso selection tool and applied the filter only to this selected area. I set the radius at 4 and the threshold at 0. (See the result here.) 

In general, higher radius values effectively remove more dust and scratches but blur other pixels in the image. Depending on the image, you can still remove dust and scratches but diminish the blur caused by higher radius values by selecting higher threshold values.

Although the filter erased most of the smaller artifacts, the larger ones remained. To get rid of these, I selected the clone stamp tool from the toolbox. In the options bar, I selected the following options for the clone stamp tool:

Brush: soft round 100 pixels
Mode: normal
Opacity: 100 percent
Aligned: checked on
Use All Layers: checked on

I positioned the cursor slightly to the side of a scratch or smudge, in an area of the sky devoid of spots. While holding the Alt/Option key, I clicked and sampled. Then I clicked and "stamped" over a flawed area, careful not to drag and smear the pixels and cause an unnatural-looking blur.

After deselecting the sky, I turned to the foreground and to the woman on the road (see it here).

This area wasn't as bad as the sky but it still needed some cleaning up. Again, I used the clone stamp tool to selectively rid the woman's arm and face of spots, this time using a smaller brush setting for the smaller areas.

This was a particularly difficult image, and I had to draw the line at how much time I was going to put into it. I could have continued to use the clone stamp tool to make each and every detail perfect. Frankly, I was satisfied with cleaning up the sky and most of the woman. After all, it is a historical photo and I wanted to keep some of its authenticity.
The final image is shown here.