Careful Handling

• One of the things that is most important when carrying out a project to digitize old damaged photos is to set up a regimen for handling the items to be scanned that will protect them from any further damage. Many of these images are highly fragile and can literally fall apart. For this reason, each image should be placed inside a protective sheath of a non-acidic paper. When placing the each item on the scanner, cloth gloves should be worn to prevent smudging and the transfer of skin oils and acids.
  
  

Scanning

• The scanner software being used for the scan should be set to a very high scan resolution. This will improve the chances for a quality scan. It will also help reduce any moire effect. The moire effect is a noise interference pattern that sometimes appears on scanned photos or other images. The image should be saved in a lossless format like BMP or TIFF. Saving in a format like JPEG automatically reduce the quality of the image before it is even edited.
  
  

Patching

• If the scanned in image has a number of large areas of damage, such as smudges, tears or foxing, these can be repaired using a graphics editing program. There is usually a tool (such as a patch tool or a cloning brush) that allows the user to select an undamaged area of the image that is similar to the damaged area and then paint these pixels over the damaged section.
  
  

Dust and Scratches

• Most older photos are going to have dust or scratches on their surface. Fortunately, most graphics programs have built-in filters that can be applied to automatically remove this sort of damage. For any severe scratches that the filter cannot remove, the clone tool can be used to select an area near the scratch and then paint this over the length of the scratch.
  
  

Color Repair

• For more recent photos that were taken in color, there is often the problem of fading or yellowing. The problem of yellow can be addressed by the restorer by applying changes to the scanned image using the "Hue and Saturation" controls in the photo editing program. Another approach is to open the "Levels" dialog and adjust the levels until the preview looks right. For images in which the color has entirely faded, the user can select a particular section that should be a single color and then change the color in the "Hue and Saturation" dialog, repeating this for each section of the image.