How to Enhance Vintage Photos for Printing and Sharing
There’s nothing quite like opening an old, dusty box to find it filled with undiscovered vintage photos. These keepsakes are windows into cherished memories and a way to connect with past generations. They’re also valuable artifacts for family historians to collect for collages, scrapbooks, and photo albums. However, age, handling, and environmental factors often leave old prints faded or damaged, and the photos themselves may be blurry, small, or low-quality to begin with.
Fortunately, BeFunky’s suite of Detail Enhancement tools provides a variety of solutions designed specifically to revive your vintage and antique photos, making even the most worn photographs suitable for high-quality printing or digital sharing. In this article, we’ll explain how each tool works and share some tips on restoring your own vintage photos.
Choosing the Right Tools for Photo Restoration
Wondering where to start when it comes to restoring your old photos? The tool – or tools – you choose will depend on the age and condition of your photo as well as your end goal in restoring it. For instance, the Old Photo Restorer is designed specifically for antique, vintage, and damaged photographs. The Upscale tool excels in enhancing small or low-resolution photos. Clarity and Sharpen DLX both bring out detail in low-contrast images, though in slightly different ways. HDR DLX improves the balance in high-contrast images, making it particularly helpful for early color or digital photos. And finally, Deblur can be used to fix slightly out-of-focus photos or images with motion blur – perfect for old photos that were taken at a moment of action.
Old Photo Restorer vs. Upscaler: Which AI Photo Restoration Tool Should I Use?
Both of these tools use AI to restore your old photo and improve its quality, but each shines in a different area of restoration.
The Old Photo Restorer is your go-to option when your vintage photos suffer from physical damage, discoloration, or significant fading due to light exposure. This tool meticulously repairs and enhances without compromising the original integrity of the image. Its effect is most transformative when used on antique photos. The Old Photo Restorer is helpful for making photos usable in collages and graphic designs, or for archiving copies of photos at their original size in a scrapbook, digital photo album, or other filing system.
In contrast, the Upscale tool is optimal when the primary issue is low resolution, or when you need to significantly enlarge the photo for framing or archival printing. It ensures your images remain sharp and clear, preventing pixelation and loss of quality that often accompanies traditional enlargement methods. This makes it perfect not just for undamaged antique photos, but also for ’70s Polaroids, ’80s disposable camera photos, and Y2K-era point-and-shoot digital photos. No matter how old your vintage photo is, Upscale can turn it into a large, high-quality file that’s ready to frame.
3 Ways to Restore and Upscale Your Old Photos With BeFunky
Let’s take a closer look at three of the Photo Editor’s AI enhancement tools. Each of these tools can be used to intelligently analyze and restore your digitized vintage photo in a single click – and if you’re not perfectly satisfied with the initial result, some also have various adjustment sliders and customization options that can be tweaked to suit your needs.
1. Old Photo Restorer
The Old Photo Restorer is ideal for photos that have experienced extensive damage or environmental wear. It uses AI to reconstruct missing areas, smooth out visible damage, and revive worn colors, ultimately producing a fully digitally restored image that still looks authentic.
Just take a look at the improvements in texture, discoloration, and contrast that we can achieve in a single click with the Old Photo Restorer:
2. Upscale
Upscale is perfect for low-resolution vintage photos that require significant enlargement, such as a small, wallet-sized portrait that you want to display on the wall. AI upscaling technology dramatically increases the photo's dimensions without sacrificing quality, and in many cases even improving it.
For example, the following vintage photo was resized from 500px wide to 2000px wide while also increasing the overall clarity. That’s over a 300% enlargement!
3. Deblur
The Deblur tool helps to restore any photographs that have a slight motion or lens blur. This is more typical of spontaneous snapshots from the late 20th century that lack the focus of professional photos, but it also pops up in earlier vintage images, especially those that were taken outside of a studio. When applied, the Deblur tool intelligently reduces blurriness and clarifies your photo’s subject.
When it comes to portraits, the Deblur tool is able to identify faces to clarify and restore them to their original liveliness:
Enhanced Vintage Photo Projects
Once your old photos are restored with better color, clarity, and resolution, there’s no limit to what you can do with them. Here are just a few ways to use your newly restored vintage photos:
Family Scrapbooks
Compile restored family photos into custom archival scrapbooks that include notes, diary entries, and other memorabilia. Instead of using fragile original photos and potentially damaging them further, you can use the Old Photo Restorer to preserve enhanced copies and create a keepsake that can be passed down for generations.
Funerals and Memorials
Use the Upscale and Clarity tools to sharpen small faded portraits for use in funeral pamphlets and digital memorials made in the Graphic Designer. A clear, high-quality photo helps people remember the dearly departed as they lived, sparking shared memories and helping to celebrate a beautiful life.
Collage Cards
Looking for a meaningful personalized gift for a loved one? Use Deblur and the Old Photo Restorer on a selection of old photos, then put them together in a collage card to create a memorable keepsake for birthdays, anniversaries, Mother’s and Father’s Days, and more.
Bring Vintage Photos Back to Life With BeFunky
Whether you want to gift a family member with a framed print, share vintage photos to your social media, create a digital scrapbook, or document family history for future generations, the Photo Editor’s Detail Enhancement tools help you preserve the best parts of your photos while fixing all the parts that are worn, blurred, or faded. For a simple, satisfying photo restoration project, use the Upscale tool to enlarge your first vintage photo today!
