SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher helps you restore scanned photos and film, as well as retouch new photos, significantly improving them. SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher helps restore old photos by removing stains, scratches and scuffs, and repairs torn edges.

Restoring old photos just got easier

Restoring multiple old photos can be a chore unless you use the right tool. SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher can automatically detect and remove common blemishes in old scanned photos and negatives, including wrinkles, scratches, dust and torn edges. Smart filling algorithms use artificial intelligence to replace damaged areas with data interpolated from neighboring areas, successfully restoring missing parts of the image without a trace of intervention.
Unlike larger photo editing applications, SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher is very easy to use, delivering results as good or better than complex professional photo editors.

Easy digital photo adjustments

Although SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher was designed as a program for retouching old photos, this tool can also improve photos taken today. digital cameras or smartphones. SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher helps you remove unwanted objects from otherwise beautiful landscape photos, remove dangling wires, and remove annoying shadows. Smart algorithms will carefully reproduce the original background that should be behind the cut-out objects, and you get a stunning, natural picture.

Always great selfies

Retouch portraits and delete the slightest flaws on the skin using SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher! This tool can make your portrait look truly beautiful without turning you or your model into a plastic doll. By very gently retouching the skin, SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher can remove imperfections such as small pimples and wrinkles, while completely preserving the natural texture of the skin.

Found in the bins vintage photo? Unfortunately, paper is not the most reliable medium, and the discovered photograph, almost a hundred years old, is unlikely to boast of gloss and clarity of the image. Don’t rush to mourn a damaged photo or spend money on a professional restorer, you can restore it yourself! A convenient program for photo restoration, PhotoMASTER, will come to the rescue. Read how to restore an old photograph to its original appearance and preserve family history.

PhotoMASTER will help restore even badly damaged photos

Restoring photos in the PhotoMASTER editor

To protect a valuable family heirloom from further destruction and return it to its original appearance, you need to convert a paper photograph into a digital format. The easiest way to do this is with a regular camera or smartphone. However, this method has disadvantages:

• third-party light sources may leave reflections on the picture,
• the photo may turn out blurry and unclear,
• Uneven camera position distorts the image.

Ideally, it is better to scan the photo, as this will preserve the original colors and avoid glare.

Now that you have a digital copy, you need to download a program for restoring old photographs from our website. Install it on your computer and run it. Open the scanned image in PhotoMASTER and let's get started.

Restoration step by step

• Cutting off the damaged edge

If the edges of the photo are very frayed, which is very likely after so much time, it is better to get rid of them immediately without regret. Go to the “Composition” section and select “Cropping”. PhotoMASTER offers several cropping options: free frame proportions, maintaining the original proportions, as well as a number of standard aspect ratios: for a VKontakte post, for iPhone and iPad, size 4:3 and others. Choose a grid type that will help you frame the image correctly.

Trim the frayed edges and yellowed frame

Now frame the part of the photo that you want to leave. The main thing is not to get too carried away so as not to spoil the composition. In cases where the defects at the edges are too deep, for example, the picture is torn to the middle, it is better to partially correct the problem areas with retouching.

• We remove defects

You should be patient, as this part of the processing is the most labor-intensive. However, restoring photographs in Photoshop and other editors takes no less time. At the same time, it is much easier to master PhotoMASTER, and it also has convenient tools for quickly removing defects in photos.

Go to the "Retouching" section. Here you will find a whole set of tools that will help you disguise torn corners, eliminate traces of bends, hide stains that have appeared over time and similar problems.

The main work tool will be healing brush. It will cope perfectly with both pinpoint defects and large damage. Adjust the brush size according to the area of ​​the problem area. If you need to remove a stain from a photo, click the brush exactly in the middle and the defect will disappear. If you need to remove a scratch, carefully brush along it.

Removing a scratch from a photo

In a similar way, you will have to completely retouch the photo. Be patient and you will be rewarded with amazing results! If the brush categorically does not “take” some defects, leave them for processing with the next tool, which we will discuss later.

Photo before and after using a healing brush

Another very useful feature is stamp. It will allow you to quickly and effectively remove unwanted objects from the frame. For example, a red spot in the background can be easily eliminated. Mark the area you want to hide, and then select the place from which you will take the donor background.

Removing scratches with the Stamp tool

A convenient tool will allow you to remove the glare that appeared during the process of converting a photo into digital form, lighten dark areas, increase sharpness or blur some fragments of the image. "Corrector". Select the area you want and adjust the color, toning, and sharpness settings.

The corrector can be very useful if in some place you were unable to carefully use the healing brush and noticeable unevenness appeared. Select this bad fragment and increase the blur value a little. The defect will not be so noticeable.

Slight blurring of a section of curtains after removing a large scratch

When restoring portraits, the option will allow a little more "Perfect Portrait". With its help, you can automatically make your skin smoother, your eyes more expressive, and your face brighter.

The “Face Lightening” style will smooth out remaining imperfections and make your skin tone more attractive.

• Improving the clarity of a photo

Over time, any paper photographs fade, and the technology of the beginning of the last century did not provide the high level of detail that modern DSLR cameras. And yet you can make the photo a little more expressive! In the "Enhancements" section there is a "Sharpness" tab, go there and increase the value of the parameter to desired value. You will notice that the image has become more expressive.

Increase sharpness to make the photo clearer and more expressive

• Bringing back “antiqueness”

If it seems to you that during the processing process the photo has lost its unique retro flair, this can be corrected. Go to the "Effects" category. Here you will find vintage filters. With their help, you can restore the touch of antiquity and the former charm of photographs from the past.

The “Retro-2” effect will color the photo in a pleasant sepia

See how photo restoration is done in the program: before and after.

Are you satisfied with the result? Then save the resulting image to your computer. You can print it on paper to replace the damaged old one or publish it on social networks.

The memory is with you forever

Now not a single precious photograph that has come down to you from the last century will be lost. Young great-grandparents will smile from the family album, and time will no longer cause their faces to fade. Entrust the restoration of old photos to the PhotoMASTER editor!

Surely many of you have already come across examples of restoring old photos online. This activity is quite interesting, and if you have a desire to master it, then there is nothing wrong with it - a good reason to learn how to work with a photo editor of a type such as Adobe Photoshop or the like. However, I will give an example of such work in the GIMP program, because... It’s easier for me to work in it.

I would also like to make a reservation right away. The article was written and is most aimed at people who, in one way or another, have experience with photo processing programs and have a basic understanding of this area and are familiar with such concepts as pixel, resolution, extension, graphic file format, and the like.

In this text, I would like to talk a little about the process of restoring old photographs converted into digital form by scanning.

Scanning the photo

To scan from a paper original, in most cases, the capabilities of a flatbed scanner for home use in A4 format are sufficient. Resolution can be varied from 600 to 1200 dpi (dpi), - depending on the size of the original. Small photos require choosing higher resolution values, and large photos require the opposite.

The whole process of further work on a photo is that it is loaded into a raster editor and all the flaws in the image are gradually corrected, from large to small. The main tool for work is, first of all, a Stamp (cloning brush, etc.). As auxiliary - Smearing (GIMP),Blurring.

To store images on your computer, it is better to use your own processing program formats; in the case of GIMP, these are files with the extension .XCF. Storing image data in these formats allows you to save the image as it was the last time you edited the photo. Upon completion of the work, the image is exported to a more convenient format - for printing or, for example, for a gallery on a website.

We remove the largest damages

We mark large breaks, cracks, scratches, stains in the photo and begin to remove them first.

To work on a photo, select from the program menu:

Tools - Drawing - Stamp

Next, in the Tools panel, select the “Circle Fuzzy” Brush as shown in the image. This brush has “soft” edges, allowing you to paint with strokes with unclear boundaries, which makes it possible to draw on details more delicately.

Now visually find a fragment in the image that can be used as a sample for the missing part of the picture (patch)- donor zone.

Make your choice, move your mouse cursor (it should look like a miniature image of a stamp) to this place and press the Ctrl key on your keyboard. Without releasing the Ctrl key, click the left mouse button once, then release the Ctrl key.

When you have given the program a sample to clone (donor cursor), move the mouse cursor along a trajectory that, in your opinion, will allow you to fill the gap in the image that you are currently eliminating.

Pay attention to what movement you made with the cursor and what area was copied to a new location from the “donor zone”. The red color shows the movement of your mouse cursor, and the blue color shows the repetition of its trajectory by the “donor” cursor, which, when moving the mouse, becomes its shadow.

For more accurate retouching in this way, you will most likely need not one attempt, but a lot of “approaches” until you are able to accurately match the “patch” and the location of the defect. For this reason, the work requires a lot of patience and perseverance, as well as a little artistic skill.

It also wouldn’t hurt to get a mouse with switchable optical resolution. (sensitivity), which will allow you to work more comfortably with drawing tools at different image resolutions, for example.

The second example demonstrates a slightly different effect.

When using this technique of filling in the missing parts of the image, it is necessary to take into account the expected trajectory of the “donor” cursor, because with a not very careful movement, you can capture with the “donor” not only the part that you planned to copy to another area, but also parts of the picture that should not be in the new place according to your plan.

The red arrow shows the trajectory of the mouse, and a little to the left and below you can see the undesirable effect mentioned in the previous paragraph. For this reason, time the movement of the clone stamp to capture and copy only what is needed, varying the length of the brush strokes and the coverage. Keep this in mind when doing retouching.

In some cases, it will be useful to use the technique of copying one section of an image to another place in entire regions, when the desired fragment is selected with the mouse, then copied to the clipboard (Ctrl+C) and then inserted into the right place (Ctrl+V). After this, in the form of a new layer, the “patch” is aligned above the lower one and is finally attached to it. After this, the edges of the patch are also masked using a stamp.
In the examples given at the end of the article, this can be seen in the corners of the image - some of them were partially copied from opposite sides and masked with a clone stamp.

We look for and remove less noticeable defects (minor scratches, dirt)

(Click to enlarge) Small defects are eliminated in much the same way as large ones, with the main difference that due to the difference in scale, the number of pixels traversed by the mouse changes, and, accordingly, the resolution of the area on which you are currently working. Accordingly, you will need to change the brush size to match the scale of the current work. A mouse with variable resolution is also relevant here as a more convenient tool.

In addition to the stamp, among the drawing tools in the GIMP program there are also such useful things as “blur”; “darken/lighten”; "Smearing."

A simple example.

Even if you use a soft brush when working with a clone stamp, you cannot exclude the possibility that, filling in the missing details of the photo, you will be forced to draw the desired element and for it to be more realistic, you will need to include it in the environment by blurring the edges of the border area of ​​​​the object. To do this, you can use the “Smudge” tool, working with it in the same way as a clone stamp, with the only difference being that the effect will be different. If you yourself have tried to draw with a pencil on paper, then you have probably observed how the edges of the line from the stylus blur when you run your finger along it. So the Smudge brush does just such a job.
In the example just above, to the left of the man’s headdress, the Smudge tool was used to smooth out the somewhat dirty dark background. To the right of the face, the “Clone Stamp” was mainly used to eliminate small debris in the photo.

The final stage

If necessary, we correct midtones, shadows and highlights in the image using the tools brightness, contrast levels, curves - at your discretion and according to the situation (original photo quality).

This task arises when, for example, you want to convert your ancient family photo collection into digital format by saving the pictures on your computer or reprinting them. Unfortunately, over time, the original version of the image may deteriorate: bends, abrasions, cracks and other artifacts appear. In general, this cannot be done without additional processing.

Theoretically, many graphic editors can be used as a program for restoring photos, but this work will require special skills, so either learn Photoshop yourself or contact specialists in a photo studio. Fortunately, there is a much faster and easier way - install Movavi Photo Editor.

We have previously published a detailed one on the blog, where you can read about all its features; here we just summarize the list of main functions:

• portrait retouching: getting rid of wrinkles, red eyes and other imperfections, there is a separate group of options for makeup;
• quick application of different photo effects;
• adding texts/inscriptions;
• improved sharpness, noise reduction in dark images, and more;
• white balance correction and color correction;
• rotation, resizing and cropping of pictures;
• Mega useful functions for removing unnecessary objects, restoring old photos, etc.

The tool has a nice interface and is easy to learn. The website has special section, where you will find detailed step by step instructions: read or remove/change the background. There are video tutorials for some tasks, for example, for the same work with damaged photographs:

With such a detailed explanation, I think everyone will be able to complete the task they choose. Let's try to see this for ourselves and repeat the steps from the video above.

The procedure for restoring old photos in Movavi

1. Download and install Movavi (a trial demo version is provided), after which we will take some old image from the Internet for testing. It is loaded into the editor by simply dragging and dropping.

2. As you can see, there are “frayed” edges here that it is advisable to remove - use the “Crop” tool, cutting off what is unnecessary. The picture will be a little smaller, but best quality. You can choose a custom size or one of the standard ones.

In the settings tab there is an option “Enhance Photo”, which may give slightly different colors and shades - try turning it on/off. Also below you will see additional tips on how to make the final photo even better.

4. If you have unnecessary details, spots, or artifacts in your photo, then go to “Remove objects.” Here we determine the brush size, search depth (preferably more) and mark problem areas in the image. Next, click “Erase”.

This tool works best at removing clearly visible objects, but theoretically, you can also try to apply it to marks from cracks/bends in a photograph: you won’t be able to remove them at all, but you can reduce them, yes.

5. To improve the final picture, the developers also recommend trying to use the “Noise Removal” and “Photo Enhancement” functions. In the first case, you can choose one of the preset correction options, in the second, you will independently set the parameters of clarity, brightness, contrast, etc.

6. If desired, one of the preset effects can be easily added, for example, if the original was in sepia before scanning. At the final stage, you can view before and after options.

In principle, it turned out quite well. Perhaps it makes sense to still work on the image parameters, but we think you have grasped the very essence of the process of working with a photo recovery program. All that remains is to save the result in JPG of maximum quality.

IN difficult situations Movavi is unlikely to replace professional worker photo studio or web studio, but you should consider the speed and ease with which you get the final image. The software performs the task almost automatically and without additional knowledge. For a home collection or printing small photographs, such a result may be enough.

I wonder what services/applications for recovering old photos you use? Write your answers in the comments.

Version: 2.0

Developer: SoftOrbits

Compatibility: for Windows 7, 8, XP, Vista, 2000

Interface: RUS (in Russian)

License: Medicine: included (serial)

File: Photo_Retoucher_2.0.rar

Size: 26MB

Description of the Photo Retoucher program in Russian

Remove unwanted objects from your photos:
Whether it's a landscape or portrait photography, it's rare that you can capture just the subject you want. A random tourist or passerby, a parked car, someone's head, arm or leg appearing out of nowhere can ruin any stunning shot. With SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher you can easily and completely remove unwanted objects from your photos. An intelligent algorithm will analyze the image and restore the original background behind the removed object. Sometimes it's hard to believe how well it works.

Face retouching and removal of skin blemishes:
SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher makes retouching faces and portraits amazingly easy. The program will not make the photos too glamorous - the face will not look like the face of a porcelain doll, however, small defects such as moles, scars, wrinkles will be removed without a trace.

Recovering old photos:
Restoring old, damaged photos requires a lot of time and experience in this field... unless you have SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher. This program will find and remove dust, scratches, stains, creases and other defects from scanned photographs and negatives. Intelligent algorithms will automatically restore damaged areas of photos, removing defects without a trace. SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher can remove scratches and stains, remove noise, repair creases, torn and damaged parts of photos, and remove marks and writing.