Repairing a photograph yourself
Repairing a photograph by hand is a real skill and a satisfying one, and the software to do it is either cheap or free. If you have the time and the inclination, doing it yourself is not a compromise.
It is also slower than almost everybody expects. This page is an honest account of what one photograph takes, so the choice is made with the real number rather than the hopeful one.
Side by side
| By hand, yourself | MemoryMend | |
|---|---|---|
| Time for one photograph | Twenty minutes to several hours, depending on damage | A few minutes, unattended |
| Time for fifty | A winter | About half an hour |
| Cost | Free to modest, plus your evenings | A pack price, paid once |
| Skill needed | Real, and it takes a while to acquire | None |
| Control | Complete. Every decision is yours | One tap saying what is wrong, and no other decisions |
| Best at | The photograph you care most about | The other forty-nine |
What one photograph actually involves
A good scan first, which is a step people skip and then fight for an hour. Then dust and speck removal, which is patient work at high magnification and is most of the time on a typical print.
Then the structural damage: cloning and healing along a tear, rebuilding what is missing at the edges, matching grain so the repair does not read as a smooth patch on a grainy photograph.
Then tone and color, which for a faded print means channel-by-channel correction rather than a slider, because the three dyes have faded by different amounts.
Twenty minutes if it is only dust. An afternoon if a tear crosses a face and you care about the result.
The parts that are genuinely hard
Grain matching. A repaired area that is smoother than its surroundings is the giveaway in almost every amateur restoration, and fixing it properly means adding grain back deliberately.
Faces. Cloning across a face is where restraint has to come from somewhere, and where a beginner most often ends up with somebody subtly other.
Knowing when to stop. The commonest failure by a wide margin is a photograph repaired past the point of being a photograph.
Where doing it yourself clearly wins
You want it exactly a particular way, and only you know what that way is.
The photograph needs judgement rather than repair — a decision about what is in the gap, an interpretation of what the damage covered.
You enjoy it. That is a complete reason and needs no defending.
What we cannot match
- Your knowledge of the photograph. You know which of the two children is which and what color the coat was, and nothing we do has access to any of that.
- The ability to stop halfway and change your mind about the approach.
- The result of an expert hour on one photograph, which beats anything automatic and always will.
The sensible split
- Do the one that matters most yourself, slowly, and enjoy it.
- Send the box. The photographs you would never get round to are the ones automatic repair is actually for.
- If you are learning, repair one here free and use it as a reference for what to aim at — the tools are all in the same place and none of this is secret.
Questions
- Which software should I use?
- Anything with healing, cloning and layer masks will do the job. The expensive one is the standard and the free ones are genuinely capable. The tool is not what makes this hard.
- How long does it take to get good?
- A weekend for dust and scratches, and considerably longer for tears across faces. The grain matching is the part that separates a repair that survives a full-size look from one that does not.
- Can I fix your repair afterwards?
- Yes, and some people do. You get the repaired file and it is yours, so using it as a starting point for hand work is a perfectly reasonable way to work.
The cheapest way to decide
Repair one photograph here for nothing and compare it with whatever else you were considering. No card, and a few minutes.
If it doesn't look like the person you remember, you don't pay.
Repair one photograph, free