3. Fix Your Pics

When the scanning is finished, take a breath. The tedium is over. Now comes the fun part—bringing your faded, flat photos back to life. "It's amazing how good the results can be," Lefkowitz says. "I scanned an old, wrinkly black-and-white print taken of my mother and her two sisters on a trip to town years ago. I colorized it, blew it up to 8x10, and made fresh prints for the three girls. Everyone cried."

Broadly speaking, the steps to editing a photo are:
1. Open the scanned picture within an image-editing program.
2. Fix the picture.
3. Save the edited image as a new file.

You've got plenty of choices in image-editing software. Most digital cameras come bundled with image editors that will do the job. Apple OS X has iPhoto built in. PCs running Windows XP or Vista should be upgraded with Windows Live Photo Gallery, with improved editing features. Three other free editors are Picasa, which is basic and easy to use; GIMP, which is more powerful and complicated; and Paint.NET, which is somewhere in between.

The two essential editing steps to fixing old, faded pictures are:
1. Adjust the color.
2. Increase the contrast.

"With prints, you need to goose up the blues and greens," Lefkowitz says, "because they fade first, leaving behind a red cast. Then increase the contrast to bring back the blacks, so your image doesn't look washed out." Controls to make these adjustments vary with editing programs. GIMP has sliders for adjusting reds, greens, and blues individually. Picasa and Paint.NET adjust color balance with single sliders. Master the controls, and you can fix a photo in less than a minute. Easy as that.

Or push yourself to do more—crop out dead space, for example, or amp up the saturation and sharpness to make the image more vivid. Fix a scratch. Try converting an old color print to black and white. Or tint it just a bit. Play around to see what looks good. Save the edited photo as a new jpeg file. Having fun yet? If so, consider stepping up to a commercial editing program. With Photoshop Elements 7, for example, or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate, you can go wild: Remove a light pole (or ex-spouse), change backgrounds, add text and a frame, transform the picture into a watercolor painting, slap your own face on the Statue of Liberty.

"I have a collection of 500 different skies that I choose from to improve an image," says Lefkowitz. "Last summer, for example, I shot an Oklahoma wheat harvest and replaced the boring, overcast sky. That's okay, because I'm an industrial photographer. If I were a photojournalist, they'd put me in jail for that."

Ironically, as these image editors have added features over the years, they've also become easier to use. The latest Paint Shop Pro, for example, creates "high dynamic range" photos, a trendy technique in which images of the same scene, shot at varying exposures, are merged into one. Yet the program's "fade fix" control has boiled down the correction of an old picture to one step. Click, you're done. Likewise, Photoshop Elements 7, released in October, has a guided editing mode that trains you how to edit a picture, as well as "quick fix" tools for brightening skies, for example.

To get started, watch videos of these programs in action on YouTube. Also check out the informative video tutorials at www.photoshoponline.com. They explain how to use a free Flash-based image editor available on the website.