Restoring old military photos
A service portrait or a wartime snapshot is often the only photograph a family has of someone. Restore it for clarity, keep the original as the record, and be careful with anything that identifies rank or unit.
What these photos have been through
Formal service portraits were studio prints and have aged like any other studio print: fading, silvering in the dark areas, cracking on card mounts. Snapshots from the field are a different story. They were small, shot on whatever film was available, carried in wallets and posted home in letters, and often folded, which leaves a crease straight through the subject. Many now survive only as copies of copies.
Getting a good capture
- Photograph the back of every print as well: names, units, dates and places were often written there
- Capture folded snapshots under even light from both sides so each fold does not cast a shadow
What to run, and in what order
Run Repair first for creases and fading, then Restore Faces, which matters on field snapshots where the face is a few millimetres across. Leave colorizing until last and treat it as optional: the model guesses uniform colours, and a wrong shade of a uniform or a ribbon is exactly the kind of error a veteran’s family notices.
The tool for this is Restore faces in a photo.
What to expect
Partly fixable. Studio portraits restore well. Small field snapshots improve a great deal, but insignia, ribbons and badges are reconstructed rather than recovered, so never rely on them for identification.
Practical notes
- Do not treat a sharpened badge or ribbon as evidence of rank or an award; service records are the source for that
- For a memorial or anniversary, print the restored portrait in black and white and offer a colorized version separately
- Share the restored file with relatives at full resolution, since copies of these photos tend to multiply and degrade
Questions
Can I colorize a WW2 photo accurately?
Only approximately. A colorizer infers likely colours from greyscale, and uniform shades, insignia and ribbon colours are often wrong. If accuracy matters, compare against reference images of that uniform and treat the AI colour as a starting point.
How do I restore a small, creased wartime snapshot?
Photograph it flat in even light, run a repair pass for the creases, then a face restoration pass, and upscale last. Small snapshots gain the most from upscaling, but details like badges are reconstructed, not recovered.
Going deeper
How to restore old photos explains the method behind this, including what it cannot fix.