How to enhance old photos and keep the face you remember
An old photo usually has two problems stacked on top of each other. The print itself has gone soft, hazy or grainy with age, and the copy you made of it, often a quick phone snap of an album page, has added glare and blur of its own.
Enhancing fixes the second problem well and the first one partly. The aim is a picture that looks like the person did, not a smoother picture of someone who never existed. That changes how you do it.
Start from the best copy you can get
Everything an enhancer does is built from the pixels you give it. A sharp, evenly lit copy of a soft print gives it real detail to work from. A blurry, glary copy of a sharp print asks it to guess.
Take the print out of the album sleeve if it comes out safely, lay it flat near a window in indirect daylight, hold the phone straight above it and turn the flash off. The scanning guide goes further if you have a whole box to get through.
Enhancing an old photo in Clara, step by step
Clara works the same way on an iPhone and in a browser. The iPhone app calls the main step Enhance and the web app calls it Render, but they run the same enhancement.
- Open Clara on your iPhone, or the web app at clara.yiribaai.com/app on a computer, and pick the photo.
- Tap Enhance on the iPhone, or Render on the web. Clara rebuilds the soft edges, clears the haze and grain, and gives washed out faces their shape back.
- Drag the before and after slider across every face in the picture before you do anything else. That is where a result is right or wrong.
- Open Adjust if the tone is off. Three sliders, brightness, contrast and saturation, are enough for most old prints: contrast first, then brightness, and saturation last and gently.
- If something in the frame should not be there, a later addition, a stranger at the edge, a stain across a plain wall, use Remove: paint over it and Clara fills the area from what surrounds it.
- Save the result, and keep the untouched copy as well.
Check the faces before you share it
An enhancer draws detail that the copy did not contain. On a face that was only slightly soft, that detail is close to what was there. On a face that was a few pixels wide, it is a plausible face rather than the face.
The test is simple: show the enhanced version to someone who knew the person. If they recognise them instantly, keep it. If they hesitate, use the original for that photo, or enhance a larger, sharper copy of it. The face restoration guide explains why small faces are where this goes wrong.
Old photos for a funeral or memorial slideshow
This is often when people first go looking for an enhancer, and usually with a deadline of days. Spend the time on the photos that will be seen largest: the one on the order of service, the one on the easel, the opening and closing slides. The rest of a slideshow passes in seconds and needs to be clean, not perfect.
Keep the look consistent from slide to slide. If you raise contrast on one print from the seventies, raise it on its neighbours too, or the slideshow will jump in tone every few seconds. And run the recognition test above on every face that matters. A family will notice a wrong nose on a projected screen long before they notice grain.
More guides
Questions
Can I enhance old photos on a computer instead of a phone?
Yes. Clara has a web app at clara.yiribaai.com/app that runs in any modern browser. You create an account with an email address, and your first render on the web is a preview with a watermark so you can see the result before paying.
Will enhancing change what the person looked like?
It can, on faces that were very small or very blurred in the copy, because the detail there is rebuilt rather than recovered. Compare each face with the original before you share or print it, and start from the sharpest copy of the print you can make.
Does Clara add colour to black and white photos?
No. Clara enhances the photo you have and lets you tune its brightness, contrast and saturation. The colourising guide explains what colourisation can and cannot know about the original colours.