cahale Loc: San Angelo, TX

I'll give it a shot. Feel free to criticize or delete as you see fit. I took the liberty of making it a standard 8.5 X 11 so you could use a decent home printer should you see fit.

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gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

First, make sure it’s scanned at a high resolution, 1200 at a minimum. Second, even a professional edit may not restore the photo to its original condition but it will certainly look better. Another solution would be to get an easy to learn program like Photoshop Elements 2024 for around $60 and do the edits yourself.

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

I don't understand the dark sky. If anything it would be better to make it lighter than the original.

SalvageDiver Loc: Huntington Beach CA

Using the V500 at 1200ppi is about as good as it's going to get. The original print doesn't have the same optical resolution as the scanner does so scanning at a higher scanner resolution isn't going to make the image sharper.

The scanned image has lots of dust and black specks throughout. You might try dusting the print prior to scanning to make the final cleanup a little easier or faster.

As mentioned above, there are services that will restore prints to some level of originality and even colorize, but the quality of those services vary, sometimes dramatically.

This print isn't in that bad of condition to do it yourself if you have even a slight modicum of PP skills with a decent PP app such as PS, PSE, Affinity, etc.

Here are a couple of examples that didn't take very long to do. If your going to print the same size (~6"sq) then the cleanup isn't as critical, but if you plan to print larger, then the dust/specs/defects etc., will be more obvious. For these edits, I just used PS. The only deviation I made from the original was the empty sky. I added some clouds but very light so not to deviate from the original very far. Just though some additional detail would make for a more interesting photo without altering the basic image. For the BW, I added a slight sepia tone. For the color, I used the PS neural 'Colorize' filter, did some minor touchup and desaturated the colors slightly to stay close to the original feel of the BW image.

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Maz

How about this one?

R.G. Loc: Scotland

BDABob Loc: Tomkins Cove, NY

Here is another attempt ..... it could probably use some additional cleanup!

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

You win.

joecichjr Loc: Chicago S. Suburbs, Illinois, USA

Picturesque and beautiful ♠♠♠♠♠

JASX2 Loc: Greenville OH

I thought I'd give this a try. I hope this helps.

imagextrordinair Loc: Halden, Norway

Fun challenge, here is another edit to add into the mix...

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MJPerini

I think you have gotten some good suggestions, and the photo itself looks quite good
There are lots of editing applications that can do the work you want. My advice is less is more, in other words , do only what you have to do or it will look like an over processed old picture.
Do selective sharpening and stay away from the sky, you'll need a bit more contrast, another adjustment that cam be applied selectively.
If yo send it out, I would give them the don't over do it suggestion.
If you do it yourself, you have gotten lots of suggestions.
The best book on Photo restoration is the one by Ctein ( he only uses one name)
Good luck

OldCADuser Loc: Irvine, CA

I've only really done two 'restorations' of old photos, coincidentally, of the same subject, only taken years apart.

The first restoration was really a bit mild by most standards, as seen in the first two images below. This was a photo of my father-in-law, taken in 1942, when he was in Army flight school. He went on to fly C-47's and C-54's during WWII in Europe. The first image was the scan of the original photo, and the second image is after I had cleaned it up using only manual Photoshop tools.

The second set of photos is also of my father-in-law, only this image was taken when he was about nine-years old, in the 4th grade. As you can see, this was a much more involved restoration, again, using only manual Photoshop tools. Note that I've included several image showing the progress of my restoration effort.

Original scan, unretouched.


This is the restored photo.


Here's the original scan of that nine-year old.


Here's the first phase of the restoration.


The second pass.


The third pass.


The fourth pass.


The last pass, where I brightened it up a bit and added a bit of a sepia tone.

Retired CPO Loc: Travel full time in an RV

This is very nicely done. One of only a few instances where I would spend significant time on post processing. If that's what you would call this.

Retired CPO Loc: Travel full time in an RV

Such as???