Restoring Black and White Photo Scans

This trick is incredibly essential for anyone looking to restore ancient family treasures for photo albums and preservation. Make sure that when you scan the photo, you do so at a high resolution to ensure the highest possible photo quality.

Original image:

 Click on the photo to get the original and take a closer look at its imperfections.

1.    Open up your black and white photo, complete with scratches and whatever other imperfections may be present.  Zoom in to get an accurate depiction of how severe your scratches are.

2.    This next process can become incredibly meticulous, so put on your patience hat and prepare for mass amounts of left-mouse button clicking. (Alternatively, if you have a WACOM tablet lying around, now would be the time to put that thing to use since you can use the digitizer pen instead of incessantly clicking your mouse.)

Select the Spot Healing Brush tool from the toolbar, or press J on your keyboard. This particular tool will help clean up any small, unwanted marks from an image even more easily than the standard Healing brush (which, basically, copies and pastes). The Spot Healing Brush will make its own sample from the pixels around the mark and match in texture, tone and lighting.

Setting the mode will change the results of how your brush emulates the area surrounding it. For this project, you’ll want to use the “Replace” option, which will retain the grain, noise and texture of the original image, and select the “Proximity Match” option, which will emulate the pixels around the edge of the brush shape.

Toward the top of the window, you should see an option for brush size. Select whatever size you think best suits the scratch and make sure that Hardness is set to zero. Keep in mind that the brush size should really depend on the width and height of what you’re trying to fix. Just make sure that the brush size doesn’t exceed those parameters, otherwise you’ll constantly be hitting Ctrl + Z to undo.

3.    Trace over any and all scratches in your photo. Instead of holding the left-mouse button down and dragging it over the scratches, click on the problem areas as if you were dabbing at it with a sponge. This is the most effective way to remove the scratches. However, if you’re fixing scratches in a lightly colored sky scene, you can very well drag the mouse across the scratch without any problem, but don’t go too crazy with your strokes—this method only works well if you make horizontal strokes.

If you see that your method doesn’t work for the darker areas of the photo, try reducing your brush size to fit each of the tiny specks on the picture and zoom in so the process doesn’t become too tedious.

4.    Similarly, you could also use the Healing Brush Tool, which emulates a sample of your photo. It is almost like using the paintbrush and coloring over your image in one particular shade. This method works depending on the range of shades in the photo.

Once you’re finished, save your image at the highest resolution PNG. The end result may not look too different from its predecessor, but bear in mind that your picture can now be easily duplicated and printed out as a high quality photo.

Final product: