GIMP 2.10 Tutorial: Repair and Restore Old Photos with Severe Damage

In this GIMP 2.10.6 tutorial, I show you how to repair or restore severely-damaged old photos that may be ripped, wrinkled, faded, blotched, or otherwise damaged in any way. I use a variety of techniques to fix this damaged photo, including using the Heal tool, Heal Selection Tool, and Paint tools - as well as using a Wacom Tablet to make a lot of these repairs.

This is a fairly tedious process, but the final product is truly stunning as it can completely restore photos that are decades old back to (or close to) their original quality.

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Download the latest version of GIMP 2.10:

Watch our tutorial on how to install and use the Resynthesizer plugin and the Heal Selection tool:

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Twitter: @DaviesMediaDes

#RepairOldPhotos #RepairDamagedPhotos #PhotoRepair

[nevalainen_visuals]

I don't know how I ended up watching this but damn it was satisfying! Good job, mate!

[MisterVloop]

This is a hard job and you made it majestically! I have plans to start doing this as a second job and this tutorial of yours really helped me and got me excited already. Fantastic job, dude! - EDIT: I wrote it too early... 31:01 How dare you say you are not an artist, man? What you are doing is art!!! Digital art is also art!

[nevermorefarm]

I don't get why you are using the paint tool to do the repairs around the tear across her mouth when the clone tool at a reduced opacity would give your far more precise color and texture samplings with which to reconstruct the damaged areas and save steps...unless altering from the original image is a goal. Your tutorial guided me to the resynthesizer plug in about which I had no idea; thank you so much for teaching me about that; it was hugely informative. Your videos are spoken at a good pace and are easy to follow.

[tomormiston]

I came across an old school photo the other day, and was shocked to see it quite badly damaged. Will use your video to help me restore it, cheers ;)

[CheaterMega]

Thx you, i worked 3 hours and finished the picture of my grand parents which was destroyed.

[standardsupplies]

Fantastic job. I'm a subscriber now.

[drutgat]

Hi Michael. Thanks for this. It is really good to know about the Resynthesizer Plugin. I have been using the Heal and Clone tools primarily, so appreciate seeing your use of the Airbrush tool, as well. One thing that I have found useful in helping to make the appearance of two different but adjoining areas of texture gradually blend into each other is to use the Gaussian Blur filter. Of course that does not help with colour, so one has to get the colour right first.

[rraiz]

Great tutorial. I can't find the Resynthesizer plug-in for GIMP on a Mac. I am using GIMP 2.10.34

[zach]

Subscribed!








April fools, I'm already subscribed

[georgetran]

The latest GIMP version does not Healer tool in the Filters pull-down menu. Would you please help? Thank you so much.

[saidlibrary]

Hi. I'm missing the part how to download the plugin healing selection, any explanation ?

[RameshPachamuthu]

Awesome video. Thanks and it worked for me. Restored my grandparents photos. Appreciate your effort and good work.

[taab]

a practice example, i like that kind of tutorials

[robert-janvanloon]

happy to see a gimp 2.10 tutorial series, sadly layers and coloring bw pics not in the series

[zeusde]

@DaviesMediaDesign First of: great tutorial.
I know, this is an older video, but i have a question to a similar process shown in this video, but has some distincitve differences, that (in my opinion) sometimes would drastically alter the workflow:
For a photobook I made a few years ago, I edited some old family pictures. I worked directly of the negatives, but they have been stored away very poorly over the last 3-4 or so decades, so they decaded quite a lot. After scanning and color-correcting them, I started working on them, but some of them were severely damaged. Damage to Film expresses in a different way as damage to images on paper. Many negatives have been stuck together, and as a result a lot of the photosensitive emulsion (in the end that is what the image is made of) has cracks like paint that dried to fast or even flaked off. The problem then is, that the "texture" of the image then is something you don't want to keep, but rather get rid of entirely. I cannot figure out a good way to archieve this without
a) retouching every single area of the image by hand or
b) use softening-filters, until the texture disappears (which degrades the quality by an order of magnitude)

Another great example of degradation of negatives is a color-shift. sometimes you cannot really distinguish between a wanted effect archieved by filters or degrading film causing a colorshift from a red to a green hue across the image. What might have looked fancy in the 80's is something that you really want to get rid of nowadyays (regardless if the colorshift is intended or not)

How would you approach an issue like this/can you do a tutorial for a cases like this? (if needed, i could provide sample images for both described cases)

[twwtb]

Which Wacom tablet do you use/recommend?

[Chookah]

At 15:50 you talk about using the heal tool - I can press CTRL and select a reference spot, but then when I hold the mouse button down and try to heal areas nothing seems to happen?

[creativewebmedia-uk]

Michael Thanks for the tutorials one of the most difficult things to remove is a totally irregular edged grayed area from part of a photo do you have a tutorial for that?

[RC-Heli]

Wow! You worked a miracale on this one Davie.

[brucethompson]

I am an aspiring beginner with GIMP; is this video applicable for the latest version, 2.10.36? Or is there a later tutorial?