Photo editing software for old pictures

[Cujet]

I have Photoshop 7.0 and I've been able to use it to fix old pictures. However, it's not ideal for colorizing B+W pics, nor is it easy to fix the colors on faded pics from the 1960's and 70's. Some time back, I had a program that was designed to fix old pics. It was kind of a one click thing, and it worked very well. I can't recall if it came with my Cannon scanner or Nikon camera. In any case, 5 computers later, it's gone.

Suggestions please!

I worked on this old pic for some time and that was about the best I could do with regard to the colors.

That's me in the mustard shirt, bottom near center. OMG.

Me now

 

[Trav]

Try PicosmosTools, its a free program but works well.

Picosmos Tools

Picosmos Tools integrates picture browsing, editing, layout, frames, and cosmetic effects into one set. It also provides plenty of source material.

www.picosmos.net

 

[JustinH]

I prefer Paint.net.

Its pretty similar to photoshop, however its open source and free.

I've been using it for years.

 

[ecotourist]

We had an earlier version of Photoshop Elements that restored the colour in 60's photos very nicely. We updated it somewhere along the line and the newer version isn't as good - at that task anyway.

 

[BISCUT]

I use Luminar. Not free but cost effective. Also serves as a plug in for Photoshop.

 

[paulri]

If you have a pre-Windows 10 computer, I would have said picture it, which came with the MS Works Office Suite (not MS Office). It could not only adjust colors & redeye, but give borders too. On Windows 10, wifey is currently trying out picosmos (sp?) and I don't have a verdict from the jury yet.

 

[wwillson]

Adobe Lightroom is fantastic at manipulating color and light in digital photos.

 

[OilReport99]

I use the Lightroom Classic, but my favorite is DXO Photolab.

 

[bunnspecial]

As much as I hate the cloud model, Adobe's "Photographer Bundle" is actually not terrible for $10/month. I've been subscribing to it for 2 years now.

That gets you Photoshop+Lightroom.

Lightroom is very much my favorite tool for sorting/cataloging/light editing photos, especially when they originated from digital capture.

For film scan clean-up, though, nothing quite beats the spot healing brush and the clone stamp in Photoshop. IIRC, these weren't there in PS 7(or maybe it only had the clone stamp-I mostly only use PS 7 when I'm running a SCSI scanner in Mac OS 9). With that said, spotting+cloning is extremely tedious.

BTW, Lightroom offers both a cloning and spot healing tool, but they are both poor imitations, IMO, of Photoshop's tools. Fundamentally, Lightroom has a different editing philosophy/mechanism than Photoshop, so the tools have to work differently.

You can do a lot of lighter clean-up work with a very, very gentle gaussian blur, which can take out a lot of smaller spots and then only leave the big ones for you to fix manually. If you want to, it's not a bad idea to do the blur in a separate layer so you can tweak its opacity, and you can even get fancy and mask areas in that layer either to blur or not blur(this is actually kind of sort of what the spot healing brush does). You can then use a gentle unsharp mask to restore some of the sharpness lost from the gaussian blur. I'm far from a Photoshop master, but that's how I'd approach it.

BTW, the blur+sharpen trick is what a lot of "automatic" cleaning software does. Doing it as I've described gives you a LOT more control over the end result.

 

[ka9mnx]

I use Darktable. It's free and works on Linux. You might give it a try.

I rarely edit my photos but I need Darktable to convert negatives that I'm scanning with my digital darkroom. I do edit these scans some, mostly cropping, but do need to adjust the color some on really old negatives. It works well enough for me.