The shoebox problem

Almost every family has one: a box, a biscuit tin or an old album full of photographs from the 1950s to the 1990s. Prints with scalloped edges, square Instamatic snaps with an orange cast, wedding photos that have faded to pink, a few slides and negatives nobody has looked at in thirty years. They are the only copies. They are also slowly deteriorating, and the longer they sit the less there is to save.

The good news is that turning them into clean new prints is a well-understood job, and most of it can be done at home with a modest scanner. This guide covers how to scan them properly, what can and cannot be fixed afterwards, and how to get reprints that will last longer than the originals did.

Scanning: get it right once

The scan is the master. Everything downstream (retouching, reprints, the copy you send to your cousin) comes from it, so it is worth doing carefully and only once.

• Resolution. For a standard 4x6 inch print, scan at 600 ppi. That gives you enough pixels to reprint at the same size with headroom, or to enlarge to 8x10 without visible softness. For very small prints (the 2x3 inch wallet size from the sixties) go to 1200 ppi. Scanning a 4x6 at 300 ppi is enough for an identical-size reprint but nothing more; if you later want a bigger print you will have to scan again.
• Negatives and slides. These need a scanner with a transparency unit or a dedicated film scanner. Scan at 2400 to 4000 ppi; a 35 mm frame is tiny and needs every pixel. If you only have a handful, a photo lab or print shop can scan them for you.
• File format. Save the master as TIFF, not JPEG. The file is larger, but it holds every bit of information and does not degrade each time you save. Make JPEGs from the TIFF for sharing.
• Colour mode. Scan in colour even for black and white prints. The slight tint of an old print carries information that helps later correction, and you can convert to greyscale afterwards.
• Turn off the scanner's automatic fixes. Dust removal, auto colour and sharpening in the scanner driver are crude and cannot be undone. Scan flat, fix later.

Clean the glass and the print before each scan. A soft brush or a puff of air deals with dust; never wipe a print with a damp cloth. If a print is stuck in an album with adhesive pages, do not force it. Scan it in place if you can, or ask a conservator.

What can be fixed, and what cannot

Once you have a good scan, the common faults of old photos fall into three groups.

Usually fixable

• Colour fade and casts. The orange, magenta or cyan shift on prints from the 1970s and 80s is dye failure. A levels or curves adjustment per channel brings most of it back, and free tools handle it well. The result rarely matches the original exactly, but it looks like a real photograph again.
• Dust, small scratches, minor spots. A healing or clone tool removes these in seconds each. Tedious on a badly damaged print, but not difficult.
• Low contrast and yellowing on black and white prints. Convert to greyscale, set the black and white points, done.

Fixable with effort

• Creases and tears across plain areas like sky or a wall. Cloning from nearby texture works. Across a face, it takes real skill and time.
• Silvering (the metallic sheen on old black and white prints). Scanning at an angle with the lid open, or using a scanner's multi-exposure mode, reduces it; the rest is retouching.

Not really fixable

• Missing detail. A blown-out white sky or a face lost in shadow on the original has no data to recover. Software can invent something plausible, but it will not be your grandmother.
• Soft focus and camera shake. Sharpening can make a slightly soft photo crisper. It cannot make a blurred one sharp.
• Mould and water damage that has eaten the emulsion. What is gone is gone.

Be honest with yourself about how much retouching a photo needs. A treasured picture with a tear across a face may justify an hour of work. A holiday snap probably does not; a quick colour fix and a reprint is enough.

Choosing reprint sizes

Old prints were small by today's standards, and one of the pleasures of reprinting is seeing them at a size where you can actually read faces. A 4x6 scanned at 600 ppi reprints cleanly at 8x10 or 8x12. Go bigger than that only if the original was sharp and well exposed; enlargement magnifies grain and softness along with everything else.

Two sizes are worth considering for most family collections:

• 5x7 or 6x8 for the album or the frame on the shelf. Big enough to see, small enough to keep together.
• A4 or 8x10 for the two or three that deserve a wall. See our guide on building a gallery wall from your own photos for spacing and frame choices.

Keep the original aspect ratio. Old prints are often 3:2 or 4:3 or square, and cropping a square photo to 4x6 loses a chunk of picture. Print at the nearest size that fits and let the shop trim the paper, or ask for a white border.

Paper for prints that should last

Since the whole point is to make copies that outlive the originals, paper matters more than usual here.

• Lustre or semi-gloss photo paper is the standard choice: good colour, resists fingerprints, looks right for a photograph.
• Matte fine art or cotton rag paper suits black and white images and portraits, and it is closer in feel to old fibre-based prints. It is also the most stable option for long-term keeping.
• Avoid high gloss for restored images. It shows every remaining flaw and reflects the room.

Whatever the paper, ask for archival pigment printing rather than a dye-based process if you want the reprint to still look right in fifty years. Then store spare copies flat, in the dark, away from the kitchen and the bathroom. Our note on printing photos at home or at a print shop explains where the difference in longevity actually comes from.

Reprinting your old photos with us

If you have scanned and cleaned the files yourself, upload them through our photo printing service and choose the paper and size per image. We print scans as supplied, without automatic enhancement, so the correction you did is the correction you get. If you would rather hand over the box, we scan prints, slides and negatives at archival resolution, return the originals untouched, and give you the master TIFFs on a drive along with the reprints.

For a whole collection, a bound photo book of the restored images often makes more sense than loose prints; the booklets and photo books page has the formats. Not sure whether a particular photo is worth restoring? Send us a phone picture of it and we will tell you honestly what can be recovered.