I recently completed the task of scanning all my old photographs onto my computer. In the process, I noticed several of the photographs are dirty and/or are starting to decay. The damage is not noticeable to the naked eye, but once scanned on the computer it became alarmingly apparent.
I'm not sure what to do about the actual physical photos, but I have figured out a way to clean up the digital photos. There are several photo editing apps available. I happened to use the free Pixlr E
All I had to do was drag and drop my photo onto their canvas and then I was able to use their tools to clean up the photo and then download it back to my computer.
The main tool I used was the Clone tool. The icon looks like a stamp:
Once you click the stamp you get options at the top:
Holding down the shift key toggles between Source and Paint. Basically, you select a Source area to copy and switch to Paint to paste it.
I also used several brush sized and opacity options depending on the area I was correcting.
I would scroll in and out, select the appropriate brush then correct. The trick I learned was to clone from an area as close to the defect area as possible. That seemed to produce the best results.
Once I had a photo corrected and downloaded back to my computer, I uploaded it to My Heritage to colorize it. There were a couple of times where I colorized it first and then cleaned it up. You will have to try it both ways to see what works best for you.
Here are some before and after shots.
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