Digital Photography Software

Yesterday I was digging in my grandma’s old photo album, looked at the past century from a contemporary point of view. Grandma died a long time ago but she still looks at us through the black and white pictures from our old fashioned family’s photo album. It is to be regretted that the prints yellow with time, the photos get finger-marks, scratches and dust. Each excursus to the history of our family strengthens my confidence that my great-sons will hardly recognize their great-great-grand-ma. The photos are getting deteriorated.

In my childhood I was made literally to wash my hands before I had a chance to very carefully turn over the pages of our family’s photo album. My slightly younger brother was completely prohibited to touch the shots without someone of the parents being close enough to prevent a disaster: the little boy was trying hard to do harm to everything he met on his way. We’ve got some photos torn to pieces as a result of his forbidden activities.

One day an old friend of my father invited our entire family to celebrate his jubilee. He was 60 years old. Word by word, a bit of retrospection, remembrances, and we soon found ourselves turning over pages of his family’s photo album … on a computer. All the ordinary paper prints, slides and films became immortal through scanning and placing them on dvd. What an idea!

Today I’m on my vacations, so there is some time to devote to digital imagery I’m fond of. I decided to start from the most ancient and though most respected photos. As I had had no scanner at home, I simply took my photos to a photo studio and ordered scanning them with the most possible quality. My plan is to retouch them by myself since it is rather expensive when ordered from a professional service. Nothing unexpected: after having fun for almost three hours with only two of the old photos (and I had hundreds of them queued) I’ve lost every tiny hope to cope with all that dust, scratches, flakes, stains, water spots and other artifacts in the way my grandmother could be proud of me. I must say I’m not a professional Photoshop guy, so finally, I asked a search engine: how can I fix old photos imperfections after I scan them?

And the machine told me about AKVIS Retoucher. It’s a Photoshp plugin software that is specially designed to remove unwanted artifacts from the surface of damaged, torn, or simply dusty photographs. You just select those imperfections with the selection tool and push a single button to start the retouch plugin. See yourselves:

I showed my 10 years old son how the program works. He’s now sorting out the old photo album with pleasure. Join him! Start with digital imagery, retouch, restore, remove defects, push the button, make you photos immortal! Long live grandmas!

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 7th, 2006 at and is filed under Photo restoration / Retouch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.