There are few things more heartwarming than looking through old photos of family members and friends, particularly when the people in them are no longer with us. But these memories can be marred by the poor condition of those pictures that have become faded and damaged over the years.
Digitising your precious photos by scanning them into your computer allows you to preserve them against further damage and loss, but it won’t fix wear and tear, or address problems with the original shots.
Thankfully, it’s now easier than ever to restore your old photos without needing to pay for a professional retouching service. The same applies to vintage videos captured by old camcorders that are considerably lower quality than the footage shot by modern smartphones. This is because a growing number of online tools can repair your old snaps and videos using AI technology, while powerful PC software lets you perform finer adjustments on your desktop.
In this feature we reveal how to use new, free tools to restore your old photos and videos, and explain the pitfalls you need to watch out for.
To illustrate our advice, Deputy Editor Robert Irvine rifled through several shoeboxes of old family snaps that needed restoring, and dug out some old holiday home movies shot on a cheap digital camcorder. Please let us know the results of your own free fixes.
RESTORE OLD PHOTOS USING FREE AI TOOLS
Colourise black-and-white photos
Some people regard colourising old black-and-white photos as needless modernisation. But as the world has always been in colour, it’s interesting to see an approximation of how our ancestors really looked – from their skin tones to the shades of their clothes.
There are lots of online tools that use AI to colourise old photos with a single click, but most require you to buy credits or a subscription to download the processed image without a watermark.
One of the best free services is Colorize (www.snipca.com/44849), which has fewer restrictions than many paid-for options and produces decent results very quickly. It lets you colourise JPEG and PNG photos of up to 5MB in size – with a maximum resolution of 3000x3000 pixels – without creating an account.
Simply upload the image (see the Before photo of my family on holiday in Weymouth in the 1950s, above right), click Start to process it – or Edit to tweak it first – then click Download to open the result (see the After photo) in a new tab. Right-click this and choose ‘Save image as’ to), but to colourise more than five images you need to pay a $6 (4.85) a month for a subscription.
