How to Enhance Old Pictures in iPhoto

How to Enhance Old Pictures in iPhoto -

Restoring old family photos is easier than you might think in iPhoto

Early photographs keep surprisingly well compared to more modern dye-based prints from the 70s and 80s. But they do eventually deteriorate – the paper gets creased and mottled by mold, which thrives in the damp garages and lofts where most of us keep our old family photos.

So it’s a good idea to scan them in as digital images before they get past the point of no return, especially given the upsurge in interest in family history. This doesn’t have to take forever, and you don’t need a fancy scanner. Any desktop multi-function device is adequate, and many can scan several smaller pictures at once and save them as separate images, saving you time.

BEFORE: Old Victorian photos are prime material for iPhoto retouching.

AFTER: Using iPhoto’s tools, you can bring your pictures into the 21st century!

You don’t need fancy software, either. If you were attempting a top-quality restoration of a badly degraded image, you’d be better off in Photoshop, but usually you can get by with a handful of adjustments and iPhoto’s Retouch tool.

Old photos usually have the same problems: fading, color shifts, skew, creases and scratches, and marks and stains on the paper base. The picture in our walkthrough has most of these, and presents an especially challenging retouching job.

There’s a knack to using the Retouch tool. Although it appears to fix blemishes by magic, it’s actually using the surrounding areas as the source for the repair. This means that if you get the Retouch brush too close to an area of different tone some of it can "bleed into your repair. You can also "brush" as well as "dab", but while "dabbing,” maintains the original texture of the area quite well, "brushing" tends to smear the pixels and produce an unnaturally smooth-looking repair.

But you can use this to your advantage when enhancing portraits like this one. Let’s have a look.

(Via Mac|Life all.)