I don't really market myself as a photo restorer and it's not really a service that I offer, but if a friend needs assistance I can usually provide something pretty decent. Recently, a friend presented me with a photo of her father taken in 1971. The picture had almost completely faded to nothing and she thought if I could do anything with it, it would surely be an improvement over what it was now.

First step was getting the photo into the computer. The photo was professionally framed & mounted and my friend requested that I do my best to keep everything as is and intact. So I took a razor blade and carefully cut the paper off of the back.

Here I found a piece of cardboard held in with small nails. After I pried back the nails and got down to the actual picture, I discovered the most probable reason for the fading: this was instant film. I don't know that much about what sort of instant b&w film was used in the past, but it was obvious that's what it was. The print was a very flimsy piece of laminated paper.

I did a high resolution scan of the picture. Here's what we had:

As you can see, it's almost completely gone. I told my friend that I might be able to improve it slightly and that the software can only work with the information it has. If the info isn't there, it's not going to come out. I told her the best we could hope for was giving it the appearance of a not-so-clean b&w scan out of an old newspaper.

Not much to work with, but I was hoping by scanning it at a high resolution that I could capture enough detail to get something usuable. I imported the image into Lightroom and gave it a simple grayscale treatment. Immediately the image jumped out:

This was already better than I had hoped for (gotta love Lightroom) and I knew immediately I was going to be able to pull a lot of detail out of the photo.

A few minor adjustments to the lights, darks and contrast gave me this:

Now it was time for Photoshop. I started the very much needed cleanup: removing dust and blemishes, fixing scratches and other damage, etc. The instant film had left these swirly rings all over the picture. I removed as much of it as I could, but in some spots removing the abnormalities made the image a look a little too "photoshopped" for my taste. Plus, since the image is only a 3X5, you probably wouldnt notice it in the print anyway.   

Truth be told, I could have spent several hours working on cleaning this picture up. It was more a question of if it really needed all of that work. I decided that it didn't and it wasn't worth the time fixing details no one would see unless they held a magnifying glass up to the picture. Altogether I spent about 2 hours. 

With the cleanup finished I added the finishing touch using Silver Efex Pro (a Photoshop plug-in), played with the lights, darks and contrast a little more and this was the final result.

Considering what we started with, I'm pretty pleased with the results. Now I'm inspired to go through my own old faded photos to see what kind of new prints I can create.