Old photos will almost always need to be cleaned up or repaired before they can be used in any publication. Scanning in old pictures only makes them digital they will still need to be corrected if they can. You can try to repair most of the damage yourself, take pictures to a professional photographer to restore them, send them to a restoring service or you can buy photo repairing software and do it yourself.
There are some things you can do yourself to the photos prior to scanning them in but unless this is something you really know how to do you may damage them more. But if you feel confident WIKIHOW has a decent article on manually cleaning up your photos. Remember that printed photos and instant photos like polaroids were burned onto different types of paper and have to be treated differently. Now if you have the original negatives or even those slides then you can take those to a photo processing store and they can run you another print.
If you have the budget you might want to find a local professional photographer who specializes in repairing the photos so that you can scan them in for yourself after. This is kind of a pricey option. If this picture is the only copy, oversized (more than 8×10 inch), you cannot find the original photographer, there are no negatives or slides of the print you might want to consider this option. Larger portrait pictures are very difficult to scan into the computer to fix. A professional photographer should have a larger scanner, professional grade software and the long-lasting photographer paper to make you another copy. Each of the professionals will need to look at your photographer to determine the price for fixing it. We did find one company online that lists the prices and has samples of their work you might want to investigate. Online Photo Restoration Services – http://fixthephoto.com/services/old-damaged-photo-restoration
There are companies online who you can mail your photos to them they will scan them into their computer and then let the software repair them. Then they copy the pictures onto a disk and return your originals. This option is really for regular photos that don’t need a lot of clean-up or repair. So if you have a box of pictures you can mail them to the company, they will scan them in and create a high-resolution copy and place them on a DVD and mail everything back to you. They usually charge by the batch and it might be a great option if you have lots of old pictures that need digitizing. If they are older picks you can pay a little extra to have them manually scanned and larger ones will cost a little more. You still have to pay batch rate so gather all of your pictures and send them in a one time. You will want to send them via Priority Mail with insurance and a required signature. Just to be on the safe side.
Finally, you can buy the photo repair software yourself and a printer/scanner if you don’t already have on, learn how to use it and get busy. We suggest that you download and get familiar with a great photo manipulation tool called GIMP. It has been around for quite a while and is FREE. There are numerous tutorials online on how to use the tools and definitely worth the time and trouble to learn how to use. You could buy a subscription plan to Adobe Photoshop which is the other Nationally recognized leader in photo manipulation software. You can no longer just buy the software you have to pay a monthly fee on their Creative Cloud platform. Exactly like Microsoft has done with their Office 365 program, There are other programs out there for a lesser price but none of them are really as good as these two.
Good luck. Until next time.
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