Why old photos look the way they do

Most of what's wrong with an old print isn't in the original moment. It's what happened to the paper afterward:

• Scratches, cracks and dust. Every time a print is handled, slid into an album or stacked with others, it picks up fine white lines and specks.

• Fading and color shifts. Color prints from the '60s to the '80s slowly lose their cyan and turn orange or magenta. Black-and-white prints go gray and flat.

• Soft faces. Small prints, cheap cameras and old film mean faces are often only a few pixels across once scanned.

• No color at all. For anything before the 1950s, color was never captured in the first place.

Five tips for digitizing your prints

1. Use soft, even light. Lay the print flat near a window on an overcast day, or under two lamps placed at an angle. Avoid the overhead light, which creates glare on glossy paper.

2. Hold your phone parallel to the print. Tilting it makes the photo look like a trapezoid. (Enhance can straighten it for you, but the closer you start, the better.)

3. Turn off the flash. It bounces straight back off the surface and leaves a bright spot.

4. Don't clean prints with anything wet. A soft brush or a puff of air removes dust. Leave the rest to the software.

5. Write down what you know. Who's in the photo, where, roughly when. Ask the older relatives now. It's the part no app can restore later.

Enhance: Old Photo Restorer

Together with Videre Research we built Enhance: Old Photo Restorer for iPhone, iPad and Mac. Open an old photo, tap Enhance, and it does the work a restoration artist would do, in seconds:

• Removes scratches, cracks and dust. It finds the damage and fills it in from the surrounding detail, with matching film grain so the repair doesn't look smeared.

• Restores the light. Faded, washed-out prints get their blacks and whites back.

• Restores faces. Soft, blurry faces become sharp again, and you choose how strong the effect is.

• Brings back color. Black-and-white and sepia photos are colorized automatically. Faded color photos get their original colors back instead of being repainted.

• Upscales up to 4×, so a small print holds up as a large one or on a TV screen.

Drag the divider to compare before and after, and pinch to zoom in on the details.

You stay in control

Restoration is personal: you know what your grandmother's dress looked like, and an app doesn't. So Enhance lets you correct it.

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