How to remove aged discolouring from scanned photos?

I use a Mac to touch up all my pictures and, so far, it has done a great job. I may just upgrade from the iPhoto to something more powerful for the heavy duty jobs.

Well my answer would be Photoshop. Cleaning up pics with it is easy, there are tons of tuts out there also if you have never used it. You can definitely do what you need to do and more with it. You could buy it or if your conscious allows torrent a cracked version of it.

Photoshop ftw! Gimp ftw (for free). No but seriously any decent image editing software can handle color correction. Including probobly iPhoto.

My son was a volunteer helping clean up people’s family photos salvaged in the aftermath of Katrina. He had acquired considerable skill through hundreds of hours of practice on his own projects. He used PhotoShop for the task and got some amazing results.

Simply rescanning should do the trick. -signed mac person

My neighbor had some scanned pics from his days back in Vietnam. After 40+ years, they wer emore than a little faded and discolored.

I fired up XnView and did a little color correction (RGB values, Gamma, Brightness, and Contrast) and they looked as good as new in under two minutes a piece… possibly better considering the state of photography in the 1960s.

Photoshop is overkill; it is swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.
GIMP is overkill; it is Photoshop only hundreds of dollars cheaper (GIMP is free)

@MissA For discolored originals?

If the photos are B&W, then any program (not just photoshop) that can convert the picture into grayscale will do the trick.

Convert to grayscale and then save the file. It will also be a much smaller file, consisting of one color rather than three or four.

But if the photo is in color already, then photoshop or any program with a color picker and an invert control should work. In a color photo…

The easy way:

1. Call up the Curves tool (command M)

2. Select white point eye dropper and click on the brightest portion of the photo. Actually clicking on the white border would be perfect.

The colors should all be neutralized.

The hard way:

1. take your color picker and select a tonality from the whitest white on the page.

2. select a small section of it and copy

3. create new file and paste that color into the file

4. invert the color to show its opposite

5. select that color

6. create a new layer on the original photograph and paste that inverted color on top of the image.

7. adjust opacity of that color layer until you see the overlay tone neutralize the underlying layer.

@jerv First, I think you are correct in your approach.

I’ve had quite a bit of luck with rescanning. Especially black and white.

I see that realeyes just elaborated.