Film is more grainy than digital, and if you don't clip the shadows, they can look 'speckly'.Īdjusting the histogram usually makes any colour shifts in the picture more obvious, which is a good reason for adjusting the contrast first. But with pictures shot on film, you may need to clip it a little, especially at the left-hand end in order to get enough contrast in the image and proper blacks in the shadowed areas.
Usually, it's important not to 'clip' the ends of the histogram because this will produce filled-in shadows and 'blown' highlights. This maximises the tonal range of the picture, so that there's a range from solid black to brilliant white. But there are black point and white point sliders directly below, and the usual advice with digital images is to drag the sliders just to the ends of the histogram. Switch to the Adjust tab and look at the histogram at the top - you'll probably find that it doesn't quite reach either end of the scale. IPhoto does have an Enhance button on the Quick Fix tab which can do the job for you with moderately faded images, but if they're particularly bad you'll get better results doing it yourself. For that reason, it's often best to fix the contrast first. It's difficult to judge whether colours need adjusting if the picture is just generally faded.
Repairing larger areas of damage might need a program like Photoshop, but iPhoto can easily deal with the usual dust spots, hairs and scratches that can spoil your old but much-loved pictures. Lastly, you may need to do some 'cloning' (iPhoto features a Retouch tool rather than a Clone tool, but effectively it's the same thing). The other thing to note is that changing the contrast can change the appearance of the colours, and vice versa, so you may need to go back and forth between them once or twice to get the balance just right. The image contrast is something else you can fix in the Adjust panel, but while the Exposure and Contrast sliders might sound like they're the best tools for the job, the Levels sliders found under the histogram at the top are actually more effective.
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By restoring a full contrast range between dense black and brilliant white, you can often restore the vibrancy and depth that's been lost over the years. The darkest parts will often be a wishy-washy grey rather than a dense black, and this makes the picture look flat and dull. Technically, these are for correcting white balance in digital images, but you can use them to correct faded photos too.įading doesn't just shift the colours - it reduces the overall contrast too. You can fix colour casts with the Temperature and Tint sliders in the Adjust panel. The dyes in colour prints don't fade at the same rate, and this is why old prints have a colour cast that is sometimes blue, sometimes magenta, sometimes another colour - it depends on the paper and chemicals used to make the print and the storage conditions. iPhoto can do both jobs, and you'll find the tools you need in the Quick Fixes tab in Edit mode.įading is probably the most obvious problem, though, and this can affect both the colours and the contrast. And old photos often have borders, which you don't really want, either because the original print had a border, or because the scanner hasn't automatically detected the edges.
When images are scanned in, they're often slightly misaligned - or, if they were taken by an amateur photographer, they may have been shot skewed. Cropping (and straightening) is a good place to start.
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