Ask HN: Tools/tips/tricks to digitize/clean up/upscale/enhance old photos? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tools/tips/tricks to digitize/clean up/upscale/enhance old photos?

4 pointsdchuk2 comments

In talking to my family this holiday season, I’ve decided to start trying to help digitize and clean up a ton of old photos. Some are in good shape and I just want digital copies at a high resolution, some have some wear and it would be great to fix bleaching and water damage.

What are the best tools and apps to do this? Any great AI tools to help with enhance/upscale/repair work?

I have an iPhone 14 pro, a multi function printer with scanner, and a canon m50 camera if that helps. Also a Mac user.

Who is doing this for fun or as a hobby? I’m stressed my family has great old pics that can be so easily lost or destroyed, would love to help preserve this stuff.

finally my time spent on r/estoration is going to be useful!

Steps I would suggest:

* High Quality Scans: Set your scanner to the highest possible DPI and scan in TIFF (You can resort to using the compressed formats as they are usually good enough, but TIFF will be the highest possible quality)

* Categorise them according to what you want to do to them: Colorisation, Repair, Enhance.

* Colorisation: Try using some of the colorisation apps on the market (DeOldify is one of the first open source models to do it, but now there are tons of user friendly apps to do the same job)

* Repair: Commission someone off r/estorations or post a free request there. If the damage seems to be similar and you just need to apply the same “filters” to remove the effects, use the batch processing ability in your favourite photo editor

* Enhance: https://remini.ai is probably the best tool for this stuff

* Backups! Backups! Backups!: Don’t forget to backup all of these photos using the 3-2-1 method, and try to save the actual physical photos too.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask me! My bio should have the relevant information so you can find a way to contact me

Also, Happy Holidays!

For most tasks the photoshop integrated AI restoration should work fine and it's included in the trial. For upscaling I would probably use an ESRANGAN or stablediffusion with the 1.5 weights.

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