1) Open your photo editing software and select the photo you wish to work with. Be sure that it is a copy, not your original digital image. This way you can always start over if you make a mistake.
2) Crop your photo using the crop tool in cases where there is a mat or extra "wasted" space in the photo. Depending upon your purpose, you may also wish to use the crop tool to cut out the background or focus in on a particular person. Since you have saved a copy of the original photo, you don't have to worry about losing important historical details by getting a bit creative with cropping.
3) Fix photo flaws including rips, tears, creases, spots, and smudges, with a variety of handy fix-it tools
- Creases, Tears, Spots, & Smudges - Most image-editing programs have a cloning or copying tool to help fix photo flaws by filling them in with patches from similar areas in the picture. If the area is large, you may wish to zoom in on the area a bit before applying the cloning tool. The best alternative in low-budget photo editing software is usually the smudge tool.
- Dust, Speckles, & Scratches - Set Radius and Threshold settings at their lowest settings and then slowly increase the Radius until you find the lowest setting that will rid your image of the dust or scratches. But since that makes your whole image look blurry, you should then bring the Threshold setting way up and then slowly lower it until you find the highest setting that still removes dust and scratches from your photo. Check the results carefully - sometimes this process ends up removing eyelashes and other important content that mimic scratches. Many graphics programs also have a global dust/speckles filter, which looks for spots that differ from their neighboring pixels in color or brightness. It then blurs the surrounding pixels to cover the offending ones. If you only have a few large specks, then zoom in on them and edit the offending pixels by hand with a paint, smudge, or cloning tool.
- Bye, Bye Red Eye - You can remove that annoying effect in your photos with automatic red-eye removal, or with the pencil and paintbrush found in most photo-editing software. Sometimes an automatic red-eye removal tool will change the original eye-color so, if in doubt, check with someone who has knowlege of the person's eye color.
4) Correct the color & contrast. You may find that many of your old photos have faded, darkened, or become discolored with age. With the help of your digital photo-editing software you can easily repair and restore these photographs to their former glory.
- Brightness - Lighten up a dark photo with the brightness adjustment. If it's too light, you can darken it a bit.
- Contrast - Best used in conjunction with Brightness, this feature adjusts the overall contrast - bringing out features in pictures that are mostly middle tones (grays with no true blacks and whites).
- Saturation - Use the saturation tool to help turn back the clock on faded photos - giving photos more richness and depth.
- Sepia-tones - If you want to give your color or black & white photo an antique look, then use your photo-editing software to create a duotone (two-color picture). If your original photo is color, you'll first have to convert it to greyscale. Then select duotone and choose your two colors (brown shades are the most common for this effect).
5) Sharpen to add focus to a blurry photo as the final step before saving.
