I tend to follow the same general workflow when editing digitized images of old photos.

1. Digitize

2. Crop and Straighten

3. Clean up

4. Adjust the Contrast

5. Adjust the Color

6. Selectively Sharpen

7. Save my edits as a PSD file

8. Resize and save as JPG for sharing

Digitizing the Photograph

Before I can edit the photo, I need to digitize it. I use Silverfast 9 scanning software on an Epson V600 Photo Scanner for photographs. I scanned the photo, front and back, as 600 ppi, saving the images as TIFF files. The scanned images are about 2800 X 4100 pixels, or about 38 MB apiece.

Cropping and Straightening

Once I’ve digitized the images, I bring the TIFF files into Photoshop and use the crop tool to crop and straighten the photos. I want to trim away any extra white space from scanning and have it as a nice rectangle. I find it easier to straighten a photo in Photoshop than to get it straight on the scanner bed.

Cleaning up the image

This is usually the step that takes the most time and work. It’s when I try to remove the damage that has happened to the photo over time. In this case - the photograph is in pretty good shape, just a bit worn, faded and dirty. I tend to do some cleanup on the background, but do most of my work on the face and clothing.

I use Topaz DeNoise AI (which is a legacy product so no longer available) to do my first pass at cleanup. What DeNoise does is just clear up the photo a bit - think of it as if the photo was behind a dirty window - and DeNoise just cleans the window. There are several standalone denoise type products on the market, and many photo editing software programs have a built-in denoise feature. I just use the old Topaz DeNoise AI because I’ve used it for years - and know what to expect from it.

Usually around the eyes is where it’s easiest to see the impact of running a denoise filter.

Here’s before I ran DeNoise

And after

If you look closely - the eyes are clearer in the second photo.

Once I’ve run DeNoise - then it’s time to get to work with the tools for cleaning up. For this photo I used the Remove tool to take out as much of the grunge, spots and damage as I could. I concentrated my detail work on her face and dress, and did more general cleaning up on the background.

With every photo, there is a tradeoff - getting as many little spots and smudges out as possible vs how long it takes. For me, the deciding factor is often how important is the photo. If it’s the only photo I have of a specific ancestor - I’ll spend the time to get it as cleaned up as I can. If the photo isn’t that important - not an ancestor or someone I have many similar photos of - I’ll just do some basic repair work.

Here’s what this photo looked like after I used the Remove tool.

Adjusting the Contrast

Once the image is cleaned up - it’s time to adjust the contrast. For many older photos, there just wasn’t the tonal range we see in modern photos - the darker tones weren’t very dark - the lighter tones weren’t very light. And in photos like this - things have faded over the past 125+ years.

I used a Levels adjustment layer to make the darks darker and the light colors lighter. On this image (as happens with many older photos) adjusting the contrast, also enhances (and not in a good way) the overall color tone of the image.

I didn’t really like how the overall image now has a strong sepia/yellow color cast - so I adjusted the blend mode from Normal to Luminosity for the Levels adjustment layer. What the Luminosity mode does is allow me to adjust the lights and darks without changing the color. In Normal mode, the color can be changed as well.

I think it looks much better. And now having adjusted the contrast, I feel like I need to go back and do a little more cleaning up of the image since the contrast adjustment can bring out some of the grunge . . .

Adjusting the Color

Once I’ve got the contrast and cleaning up where I like it, it’s time to adjust any color issues. For this image, I just used a Saturation Adjustment level and decreased the overall saturation just a bit. For cabinet cards, I don’t really like them too sepia/yellowish - but don’t usually want to take them to a black and white image. It’s a balance of maintaining the feel of an older image and creating something that I like the way it looks.

Sharpening the image

One of my final steps when I’m editing an image is to selectively sharpen the image. I’m trying to draw the viewers eye to specific places in the photo by sharpening the focus/defining the edges. On images like this - I’ll sharpen the eyes, nose, mouth and maybe the clothing.

I use a High Pass Filter with a radius of 4 pixels, with a Soft Light blend mode. And then I add a mask to tell Photoshop where I want the sharpening applied.

Yes I know, these last two sentences are full of jargon that makes no sense if you don’t use Photoshop - sorry about that. The take away for sharpening is that it’s a tool that you can use to draw your viewers eye to where you want them to look in your image.

And that’s it. My basic process for old photos

1. Digitize

2. Crop and Straighten

3. Clean up

4. Adjust the Contrast

5. Adjust the Color

6. Selectively Sharpen

7. Save my edits as a PSD file

8. Resize and save as JPG for sharing

And for a final comparison - here’s where I started

And here’s where I finished

I hope you find my basic editing process helpful. I’m happy to answer questions about how I’ve edited the image.

So I don’t know about you, but I often get overwhelmed by the number of results I get using FamilySearch’s Full Text Search. I find that I start clicking on links, end up with a bunch of tabs open, and no record of my thoughts on what I’m finding. And then I’ll run the same search on a different day, and end up looking at multiple links that I’ve looked at before.

Then I’ll head to the Family Search Center and run the same search and get even more links. Some will be to records I can access from home, some will be records I can only access at the Family Search Center. And half the time, I end up spending time with documents I can access from home and don’t focus on the ones available just at the Family Search Center.

This week, when I found myself looking at a document for the umpteenth time, I thought there has to be a better way to do this . . .

And after multiple attempts, many conversations with friends and a great suggestion to use Word instead of Excel for part of my process from Kimberly Powell, I’ve got a workflow that creates a list of Full Text Search results sorted by where I can access the records.

Here’s what I’m doing. I’ll use the example of searching for Lucas Weart in New Jersey for the demo.

Step 1 Create a list of records I can access from home.

On the page for Full Text Search, enter the exact name you are researching in quotation marks and then filter for location, type of record, date - whatever works for you research question.

On the results page - switch to Fact View and increase the number of results per page to 100.

For “Lucas Weart” in New Jersey, I got 33 results at home.

And then just copy/paste the results into a Word document.

I saved the document as Lucas Weart NJ Home 33 records.

Step 2 Run the same search at the Family Search Center.

When I ran the search “Lucas Weart” and filtered for New Jersey at the Family Search Center, I got 36 records. I created another Word document called Lucas Weart FSC 36 records.

Step 3 Put Claude to work

Using Sonnet 4.6 on a free Claude account, I uploaded the two Word files and gave Claude the prompt:

These two Word documents have links to records from Family Search accessible from either home or the family Search Center.

The Lucas Weart FSC 36 records document has the records available only at the Family Search Center.

The Lucas Weart NJ Home 33 records document has the records available from home.

Can you go through the two documents and extract the titles and associated URLS, and put them into a spreadsheet?

If a document is available at both the Family Search Center and at home - please code it as home

If a document is available only at the Family Search Center - please code it as family search Center

Some records may have the same title but different URLs, please treat these as different records.

If a record doesn’t seem to have a URL, please check to see if the record has an older Word HYPERLINK field type rather than the modern hyperlink format. The first record in similar documents has had the older HYPERLINK field type.

It took Claude just a few minutes to come up with the a spreadsheet I could download. The spreadsheet identifies 33 records I can access from home and 11 I can access only at the Family Search Center.

If you like to use Excel as an organizing/tracking tool - you’re done!

Step 4 Import into Airtable

I’ve started using Airtable to manage data. I’ve created an Airtable Base - Full Text Search Results to keep track of my searches and what I need to do. You can download a Read only copy of the base here. Feel free to duplicate and modify the base so it works for you.

My base has three permanent tables, and one temporary table used for importing data.

To import the spreadsheet, click on Add or Import on the top line. Choose Microsoft Excel from the dropdown menu. And follow the import process.

Next I add my searches to the Search Table. The Search Subject is a Linked Record to the People Table. The Where Searched is a single select field with two choices - FS from Home and FS from FSC

Then I go back to the table with the imported records - in this case Lucas Weart Records and highlight the Title and URL fields for records available at home and copy/paste them onto the Records Table.

Then I fill in the Search Name which links to the Searches Table and select the appropriate search. Search Subject and Where Search fill in automatically since they are lookup fields associated with Search Name.

Next I copy/paste those three fields into the remaining records I just added.

And then I repeat the same process for the records available at the Family Search Center.

Now I can start working the records, and keep track of what I’ve looked at, any comments I have on the records, etc. There are two more fields in the Records table - Comment (a long text field) and Done (a check box field) that just let me know what I’m doing.

There are two views on the records table in addition to Grid View.

Richard Hankins - is a view filtered by Search Subject contains Richard Hankins. This shows me all the records for a specific person. The view can be changed to any Search Subject just by changing the filter.

TO DO by location is my favorite view! It lets me see which records for a person I haven’t worked with that I can access from home, and which I can only access at the Family Search Center. The table is filtered by Done (if the done box is checked, then the record is hidden). It is grouped first by Where Searched and then by Search Subject. And finally sorted alphabetically by Source.

I still have 33 records to look at for Lucas Wearts at home, and 11 more to examine at the Family Search Center.

If you have the same organizational challenges with Full Text Search results that I do - I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any questions or figure out a better way to do this!

Today, I decided to see what I could do with AI - specifically Google Gemini 3 - since at this point their Nano-Banana 2 seems to be the best image generator available.

I uploaded the jpg file I had and gave Gemini the following prompt:

This is a scan of a photo copy of a photograph from the 1870s. Can you create a more realistic looking image that the photo might have looked like originally

And I was shocked when I saw the result!

To my eye - it looked like what I thought the original photo may have looked like based on the image I started with.

I brought both the 800 X 1280 pixel image created by Google Gemini 3 and the 390 X 632 pixel image I had into Photoshop. I enlarged the scanned image to 800 pixels wide and brought it into the Google Gemini 3 image as a new layer. I then used the Auto-Align tool to have Photoshop bring the images into alignment. And then I dropped the opacity of the scanned image to about 50% so I could see the Google Gemini 3 created image through the scanned image.

Doing a little pixel-peeping - I can spot places where the images aren’t aligned. Google cropped a bit off the top and added more carpeting at the bottom of the image. There is a bit of misalignment in his head. I’m not sure about some of the details on the wall that Google created. But overall - I’m impressed.

So do I have a photograph of what John Call looked like? NO - I have an AI generated image of what he may have looked like based on a scan of a photo copy of a photograph. But it’s more than I had before.

When I share the image - I’ll be sure to label it as AI generated by Google Gemini 3 and I’ve left Google Gemini’s watermark indicating it is AI created on the image.

I suspect I’ll use this technique again in future - I have more than a few photo copies of photographs where the location of the original images is unknown. For images I have a good digital image of though, I’ll still be editing the traditional way in Photoshop and Lightroom.

Have you found other ways to create images from photo copies of photographs? If you have, I’d love to hear about it.

I’m a genealogist and photographer in the Washington, DC area. I became fascinated by family history when my grandfather shared some family stories with me when I was nine years old. A few years after that, I saw a family photo album from the 1860s and knew I had to learn more about the people in the photos.

Fast forward almost fifty-five years, and I’ve become much more serious about genealogy and sharing what I learn about my family.

When I wasn’t doing genealogy, I was photographing. For fifteen years, I ran a photography business, closing it in 2020. At the time, I was mainly leading photo tours and teaching photography including photo editing.

So now, I combine my loves of genealogy and photography. I’m the custodian of thousands of photographs in my family archives, dating back to the 1850s. I’m in the process of digitizing, and editing the photos. And then sharing them on my blog Wandering Around the Family Tree, with hopefully enough information about the people in the photos that others researching the same people will find the photos! The purpose of that blog is to share and identify as many photographs as possible (as well as other family information).

Here, I’m planning on doing something a little different - talking about some of the photographs, including how I research the history of the photos, and how I digitize and edit them. Since I know others are dealing with their family photo archives as well, I decided to separate out my posts about specific photographs and photo editing - rather than make everyone have to see almost 400 family photos dating from 1904-1914, to find out about a 1913 photo of the Cuban Giants baseball team.

I’d love to have you join me on this journey - subscribe to follow along as I work with the photos in my piles of family stuff!

Looking forward to getting to know you.

Patty