Looking to restore your old photos for free or with Photoshop? We’ve picked out the three best techniques to help you do just that.
Learning how to restore old photos is a great, family-pleasing skill to have – and whether you’re looking to do it for free or with Photoshop, it’s never been easier. In this guide, we’ve picked out our favorite free options for web browsers and smartphones, detailing their strengths and weaknesses. And for Photoshop fans, we’ve also created a simple step-by-step guide to restoring old photos using Adobe’s software.
Old family photos can help to bring our family histories back to life. But unless you’re using archival methods to store your old photos, they’ll probably have been damaged to varying degrees over decades of less-than-perfect storage.
The good news is that there are now plenty of smartphone apps and websites using AI that will restore photos for you automatically, and in some cases, for free. And if you’re a Photoshop user, you can achieve professional results in just five easy steps once you’ve digitized your photos.
How do you digitize old photos before restoring them? There are three main methods, and all work exceptionally well. The easiest is to take a shot of the old photo using your smartphone using an app like Google Photoscan. Or if you’d like a larger, higher-quality version you can use a mirrorless camera or DSLR. A kit lens will work just fine, but if you have a macro lens this will be even better.
The final way to digitize old photos is to use a flatbed scanner, but since these aren’t as popular as they once were, many people no longer have access to them. Once you’ve digitized your photos, it’s time to restore them using either free AI tools or by taking a more manual approach in Adobe Photoshop. Here are the best options for both routes, so you can get your photos ready to display on your laptop, TV or the best digital photo frames.
VanceAI (opens in new tab) is an AI-powered photo editing website where you can take advantage of a wide range of editing tasks including image sharpening, noise reduction, portrait retouching, photo restoration and much more.
There are limitations on its free version. Each editing task requires 0.2 credits, while downloading an image requires one credit, with three free credits available each month at a size limitation of 1996 pixels (16.9cm at 300dpi) on the long edge of the output file. A small VanceAI watermark is also added to the image.
To take advantage of higher resolution output files with no watermark, you have to subscribe to a credit plan.
