c/old-photos-restored

evah40•20d ago

Tried restoring my grandpa's wedding photo with a $3 phone scanner app, ended up making him look like a glow-in-the-dark ghost

Last Saturday I finally got around to digitizing this 1952 photo of my grandpa and grandma. The app I downloaded had a 'smart enhance' button, and I figured hey, one click, what could go wrong? It cranked the brightness so high that my grandpa's face literally looked like a nightlight. Grandma was fine, but he looked like he was about to haunt our family reunion. I spent 2 hours messing with the sliders trying to undo it, then just gave up and used the free GIMP tutorial someone posted here. Has anyone else had an app turn a person into a zombie or alien? Asking so I can avoid the next disaster.

1 comments

robertsmith•20d ago

GIMP vs free online restorers, no contest after 30 photos

I spent the last 3 weekends cleaning up my grandpa's 1940s Navy photos. Tried those free websites first, the ones where you upload and it auto-fixes. They smoothed everything into a blurry mess, like a bad filter. Then I sat down with GIMP and watched a 20 minute tutorial on the healing tool. Night and day. The scratches and fold lines actually vanished without wrecking the detail on his uniform. Has anyone else given up on the auto stuff and gone manual?

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harper_wells•22d ago

My grandma's 1948 wedding photo now has her ex-husband's face on a different body

Used GIMP's free clone tool to fix a tear across her veil, somehow ended up swapping his head onto my grandpa's shoulders in the process. Anyone else accidentally create franken-people while trying to clean up scratches?

1 comments

the_nancy•22d ago

Do we really need to restore every photo or let some fade?

I read a comment last week in a genealogy group that said fixing up every old picture erases the history of wear, like the creases tell a story too. I mean, I get it, but also my grandma's 1947 wedding photo in Chicago was so dark you couldn't see her face, and bringing it back felt like the whole point. Is there a line between saving a memory and over-scrubbing it, or is any restoration better than none?

1 comments

corad84•22d ago

One comment about skin tones made me redo my whole workflow

Someone on here told me my color correction made everyone look like they had jaundice. They were right, I was pushing the warmth slider way too hard on every photo. I switched to using the gray card trick from a tutorial and now I match the skin tone to the original print instead of what looks nice on screen. Has anyone else had to unlearn a bad habit from a random comment?

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zara_perez62•24d ago

DON'T use the auto-enhance button on phone apps, nearly wrecked grandma's wedding photo

I was cleaning up a 1954 photo from my grandma's wedding in Cleveland, and the auto-enhance on my free app turned her white dress into a blue blob and erased my grandpa's face details. I tried every setting for 2 hours before I found the manual brightness and contrast sliders in the same app, which took maybe 15 minutes and kept all the grain. The auto feature also added weird purple spots around the edges that I had to clone out with a free browser tool called Photopea. Anyone else have an app that ruined a scan before you could undo it, or is it just me?

1 comments