You’ve probably been thinking about them. Those old photos and family memorabilia that mean so much to you, but have sat stagnating in a drawer or another dark place for years. Nana on her 90th birthday. Mom posing with her first car from high school. Dad on Christmas morning when he still had all his hair.
Restoring and colorizing old photos can be daunting, both technically and emotionally. You might not want to spend hours meticulously patching cracks in pictures of people you miss so badly it hurts. Plus, the actual labor of colorizing and correcting old photos is a skill and an art that used to take a ton of practice to perfect.
But now that generative AI is on the scene, all you need to breathe new life into old images is this guide. Here’s how to tackle colorizing and restoring old photos and memorabilia with AI.
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Digitize your memories
The best, cleanest way to digitize old photos you want to colorize and restore is to scan them. If you’re like me and are still searching for the perfect printer/scanner combo, the next best thing is to get your old photos on the flattest surface possible and snap some well-lit pics with a camera or your phone.
Select the right system
Lots of AI systems with generative capabilities claim to be able to expertly colorize and restore old photos. I’m using Adobe Firefly for this batch of memorabilia and old pictures because of the software’s capability to generate and patch, but also for its integration with legacy photo editing software, Photoshop.
If you’ve got even the smallest skill set in Photoshop, Firefly can serve as a simple bridge when you’re ready to do more with your restored and colorized old photos.
Step-by-step instructions
1. Upload photos: It’s best to edit the old photos one-by-one. I’m working with a set of images of my father and my grandmother, which have suffered the wear and tear of decades in wet places and barely-held-together ancient albums.
2. Give specific instructions: Dark spots, creases, cracks, spots and water damage dot all of these images. Make sure to fill in the prompt instructions with notes on what you want included in the final generated image and what you’d like to keep. For example, two of these images feature text, so I’ve specified in at least one that the text be cropped out.
Here’s what happens when you leave the text restoration up to the machine:
Firefly colorized most of this sheet, including the text, but it missed the bottom right picture, which remains black and white.
3. Make refinements: Outsourcing the fine work of restoring and colorizing old photos to an AI system like Adobe Firefly doesn’t mean you’ll get a perfect result each time. This photo had to be refined with further prompting to reach the end result.
My original photo, with tears, marks and discoloration.
Firefly didn’t quite get the eyes or the color tones correct on the left image, so I continued prompting it until it produced the image on the right.
4. Watch out for adlibs: Although Adobe Firefly was able to adeptly colorize and remove the text from this image, it made the executive decision to change the image to a circular crop, so I had to rewrite my prompt, specifying to “keep the photo square.”
Firefly colorized this old photo, but the AI tool decided on its own to make the image round.
5. Go stage-by-stage: This image was in bad shape, and trying to ask Adobe Firefly to fix everything all at once resulted in a completely new image being generated. If your photo has low lighting, spots and scratches and needs to be colorized, take the process in stages.
In the first stage, I asked Adobe Firefly to enhance the lighting and remove any blemishes, spots and lines on this image. I also asked it to crop and rotate the image to be vertical.
Once that was done, I asked Adobe Firefly to colorize the restored image.
Here’s the difference between new and old:
The original image and the AI-restored image.
