Restore Old Photos

I was clearing out some old boxes and found a few photos of my mom when she was young, all yellowed and hard to make out. My daughter came over asking who it was, and I said that's Grandma. I fixed one up and there was my mom in her twenties, clear as day. My daughter just stared and said, “So that's what Grandma looked like.”

My parents' 50th anniversary is coming up, so I wanted to surprise them. I dug out their old wedding photo. The whole thing had faded, and the edges were starting to flake. I ran it through, and when I showed them, my mom covered her mouth and laughed, and my dad just looked at it for a long while and said it felt like being back there.

Three generations of family photos had been sitting in old metal tins and had started to get damp. I only meant to scan them for backup, but I tried fixing a few, and the one of my grandpa holding my dad came out so much sharper. I've done about sixty over the past couple of weeks and sent a few to the older relatives. Honestly, they're more into it than I am. They keep asking me to do the rest.

I run a photo studio, and people are always bringing in old pictures of their grandparents and asking if I can fix them. I used to spend an hour or two per photo in Photoshop. Charge too much and they balk; charge too little and I lose money, so I turned a lot of them away. Now it handles the basic restoration, and I just do the touch-ups. Some jobs I wouldn't have taken before, I can say yes to now.

I'm a designer, and I recently put together an anniversary book for a client using a lot of their old photos. The scans were full of scratches and little specks, and they looked rough dropped straight into a layout. I ran them through first, and most came out a lot cleaner, then I handled the color and layout myself. A few still needed manual work, but it beats cleaning them one by one.

I've lived abroad for over ten years now and mostly keep up with family over video calls. A while back, my mom scanned a bunch of our old photos and sent them over: family portraits, the old house back home, all of it a bit faded and washed out. I've been restoring them in the evenings and putting them into an album. When I miss home, I just open it and look through them.