A photo in a book has one job. It lets the reader see the person you’re writing about.
Take a cracked, faded, brown-stained print. It does that job badly, and the reader squints at a blur where Grandpa’s face should be and moves on. Clean that photo up, and the same reader stops, looks at his eyes and the cut of his suit, and the chapter about him hits harder. Most family photos have no value as art. They’re the closest the reader will ever get to meeting the people in the book That’s the reason I care how they look.
My rule for any photo going into a book is simple. Give the reader the best experience you can, and keep the original.
Should you use AI to restore old photos for a book?
Yes, if you do it with your eyes open. The fuss about AI photo restoration is mostly overblown, and it’s the same argument people made about colorizing old movies. Some of the worry has a point, but nothing about cleaning up a damaged photo of your mother is dishonest.
A reader picking up a family history book wants the experience of seeing these people. They don’t want a forensic artifact. A museum or a genealogy archive has a different job.
What I did with about 10,000 family photos
I had every photo I own scanned by a service in India. I boxed them up, mailed them over and got them back as digital files, about 10,000 photos in all. Every scan came back with some basic cleanup done: cracks taken out, dust removed, that kind of thing. On the service’s website there was a checkbox for heavier enhancement, for something like 50 cents to a dollar extra per photo. That removes big cracks and big damage.
Most of my photos didn’t need it. For the ones where the damage was bad, I checked it every time, because it made a much better photograph.
I’ve spent a big part of my life behind a camera, with close to a million photographs of my own, and I’d still rather look at a clean print than a damaged one. So would your readers.
What does AI photo restoration change in an old photo?
It depends on how hard you push the tool, and the difference matters.
Basic cleanup works on what’s already there. Dust specks, scratches, small cracks and stains get filled in from the pixels around them. The face in the photo is still the face the camera recorded. Old-school retouchers did this with a brush for a hundred years.
Heavy enhancement and colorization work differently. When a face is a few blurry pixels, there isn’t enough information in the photo to rebuild it, so the AI makes its best guess. MyHeritage said so openly when it released its Photo Enhancer in 2020: the tool infers what faces looked like. Colorization guesses too. The software has no idea your great-grandmother’s dress was green, so it picks a likely color.
People get burned at this step. In one genealogy thread I read this week, people described AI tools that changed the shape of a face, made a relative unrecognizable, and in one case erased a woman’s jewelry. A military history buff complained that colorized uniforms kept coming out the wrong color. Those complaints are real, so check the work.
Give the reader the best experience you can, and keep the original. – Richard LoweShare on X
Keep the original, always
The original scan is the master. Every restored, enhanced or colorized version is a copy you made from it, and copies get replaced when the tools get better. Store the originals in their own folder with their original file names, back them up in two places, and never overwrite one with an edited version. The restored file gets a new name. If someone ever asks what Grandma looked like before the software touched her, you can show them in ten seconds.
I’ve told readers before what to do with a box of unlabelled photographs, and the same advice applies: scan first, label second, edit last.
How do you scan old photos so they print well in a book?
Scan at a resolution high enough to survive printing. A book printer wants images at 300 pixels per inch at the size they’ll appear on the page, so a small wallet photo that will run half a page needs a much higher scan resolution than a large print. Scan ordinary prints at 600 dpi and small or important ones at 1200 dpi, and you’ll have room to crop and enlarge later. Save the masters in a lossless format like TIFF, and make JPEG copies for everyday use.
You can do this yourself with a decent flatbed scanner and a free weekend. Or mail the whole collection to a scanning service. That’s what I did. A service is faster when you have thousands of prints, and the good ones include basic cleanup in the price.
Do the restoration on a copy, at full resolution, and only then size the image for the book. If you restore a small, low-resolution file and blow it up for the page, the AI has even less to work with and guesses even more. The cleanest faces come from the biggest, sharpest scans.
One more practical point. Photos printed on cheap paper, especially in a paperback, lose detail and contrast. A restored photo with clean edges and good contrast holds up on the page far better than a faded original, and readers notice. Clean, properly sized photos make a family history book feel cared for. Muddy brown smudges make it feel like an afterthought.
How should a book label a restored or colorized photo?
Tell the reader what you did. It costs you one line.
A short caption works fine. “Restored from a damaged print” will do, or “Colorized; original was black and white.” If labeling every caption clutters the page, put a note in the photo credits or the acknowledgments explaining that the photos were cleaned up and some were colorized. Mention that the family keeps the original scans. MyHeritage marks its enhanced and colorized photos with a small icon and keeps the original untouched. That’s a sensible standard for anyone.
For anything meant as a record, go further. Genealogy sites, family archives, museum displays and anything that might end up as evidence should show the original next to the restored version, or carry the original alone. A researcher fifty years from now needs to know what the camera saw.
Is a colorized photo a lie?
No more than a retouched portrait was in 1950.
Photographers have been adding color to black and white images almost since photography began, with hand-tinted portraits going back to the 1840s.
For decades, studios colorized portraits as a matter of routine, and some families still have prints with the instructions written on the back: eyes blue, hair brown, sweater pink. A photographer who worked in a darkroom before personal computers pointed out in that same thread that retouching, dodging and burning were everyday parts of making a print. The mole on your great-aunt’s chin may have vanished in 1938, long before any AI touched the photo.
A colorized photo is an interpretation. Labeled as one, it’s honest. Passed off as the original, it isn’t.
When should you leave an old photo alone?
Leave it alone when the photo is the evidence. If a family history book uses a photo to prove something, like who was at a wedding or what a regimental insignia looked like, use the original or put the original right beside the restored version. When the color carries meaning, like a uniform, a flag or a team jersey, and you don’t know the true color, skip the colorization or say outright that the color is a guess.
Skip the restoration when the damage is part of the story, too. A burned corner on the only photo that survived a house fire tells the reader something. Some authors want that, and that’s a fair choice.
And check every face. Show the restored version to someone who knew the person. If your aunt says “that’s not Dad’s nose,” believe her, go back to the original and try a lighter touch.
What I tell authors putting photos in a book
Scan everything at high resolution before you do anything else. Clean up dust, scratches and cracks freely, because that work doesn’t invent anything. Use heavy enhancement and colorization where they make the photo better for the reader, check the faces, and label what you did. Keep every original. And when the book is a record as much as a story, show the originals.
I use the same approach when I help clients build a family history book from genealogy, photos and recipes. If you’ve got four hundred photographs and no book yet, the photos are a great place to start.
The publishing and marketing hub covers the rest of book production, and if you want help turning a family’s photos and stories into a memoir, my memoir ghostwriting process explains how I work. Fix the photo so the reader can meet the person. Then put the original somewhere safe.
