How to fix faded photos

If you have older photos that you have scanned, they might be faded because of age, or the initial quality of the camera at the time, or a combination of both. Since you have PaintShop Pro at your fingertips, let's see how you can improve those faded photos.

Fade correction command

As its name implies, this is the most obvious way to correct the colors of a faded photo. You can find that command under Adjust > Color > Fade Correction. This command is available on pretty much all the PaintShop Pro versions as I can confirm it is on my old JASC PSP8 version.

Here is a starting image that needs a bit of help to get those colors to pop.

Using the Fade Correction command with a setting of only 50, here is the result.

Doesn't that look much better? Of course, you might want to play with the setting to see what gives you the best or most realistic result, as it could vary from photo to photo.

Smart Photo Fix

Another command that can let you adjust the faded colors is the Smart Photo Fix that you can find directly under the Adjust menu. This command appeared in version X. It will suggest some edits but you can always tweak the suggested settings to your liking since the program can only analyze what it perceives and it can't really "see" the picture.

Here is one image that needed some adjustment.

As you can see, the colors are faded and the whole picture has a yellowish tint to it. The Smart Photo Fix gave me some suggestions, but I still found that the colors were too yellow. So I used the option available to click on a black, white or grey so it could adjust that color accordingly. I chose to click on the white shirt (back in those days, the shirts were not off-white so it is a great reference point).

And you can see the resulting picture, on the right, has lost some of its yellow tints.

Of course, this photo might not compare with a perfectly taken photo with a top of the line camera with lighting and such, but if you have older photos, they come with memories and stories that can now be told along with a reasonable photo.

Do you have some old photos sitting in a dusty box under the bed or on the top shelf of a closet? It is time to get them out, scan them and fix them so you can those old stories.