How To Fix Faded Photographs

Welcome to another Masters Monday here at the Trixie Scraps blog. Today, I’m going to bring you a seriously quick tutorial on fixing faded photos.

A few years ago, I did a slideshow for my grandma. Because of this I have a lot of her old photos saved on my computer. At the time of the slideshow I didn’t know how to fix the fading from time. But now, I can bring new life to some of these old photos.

Here’s the picture we’re starting with.

Now open up the image you want to start with.

We then go into ADJUST – COLOR – FADE CORRECTION.

This brings up a window that asks how much correction we want to use. I found that numbers 25-45 work really well on the photos I’ve worked with. You can already see in the preview that the correction takes out a lot of the orange tint in the original photo.

To add a little more life to our photo, we then go to LAYERS – NEW ADJUSTMENT LAYER – VIBRANCY.

Again, you will adjust to your liking. I really wanted the red in my grandpa’s sweater to pop, but going past about 40 gave me too much orange in other places in the photo. If you want to see how your setting will affect the whole photo, there is a button in the middle of the pop-up window that will scroll out so that the whole photo is in view.

Here’s what my photo will look like after using that 35 setting.

You’ll then want to make sure you merge your layers together.

You can end there, or you can add just a little more something. For instance, you can use the vignette setting that we showed you in our tutorial a couple weeks ago.

When all is said and done you’ll have breathed new life into an old photo.

I realize that by using the vignette setting, I turned a lot of the photo dark. I like it. My grandparents end up being the focal point of the photo instead of the busyness of the ship in the background. I also like that the color in my grandparents clothing tend to pop instead of being just kind of blah.

Go fix some of your old faded photos, make a layout and then share your beautiful works in our gallery. We really do enjoy seeing your work.