Formats
Newspaper Clipping restoration
A newspaper clipping is a wedding announcement, an obituary or a team photo cut from the local paper and kept in a Bible or a drawer. The picture on it is a coarse halftone on the cheapest paper ever made.
Newsprint is acidic and turns brown and brittle within decades, the halftone dots dominate at close range and the ink transfers to whatever touches it. Most of what goes wrong with a newspaper clipping is on the surface, and the image underneath is usually recoverable from a good scan.
Start with Newspaper & Yearbook Photo Restoration for the newspaper clipping, then add Scratch & Tear Repair or Stain & Spot Remover for anything it leaves behind. The 4 free credits on a new account cover one Standard pass on a newspaper clipping.


Original on the left, restored on the right; hover to see more of the repair. Made in the Studio from a scan of the print.
Print and file requirements
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Years in use | 1880s onward |
| Typical size | Column width 1.8 to 2.1 in; photos 2 to 6 in wide |
| Process | Coarse halftone, 55 to 85 lines per inch, on groundwood newsprint |
| Appearance | Large visible dots, brown paper, printed caption |
| How it fails | Browning, brittleness, tears, ink transfer, moire on scan |
| Scan tip | Scan on a white backing sheet so text from the reverse does not show through |
What matters for these photos
- Browning, brittleness, tears, ink transfer, moire on scan on a newspaper clipping
- A newspaper clipping scanned once, badly, and never touched again
- Faces on a newspaper clipping that are too small or too soft to enlarge
- A reprint of the newspaper clipping for a frame, needing more pixels than the scan has
Suggested order of passes
- 01
Run Newspaper & Yearbook Photo Restoration on the newspaper clipping
Written for the way a newspaper clipping fails: browning, brittleness, tears, ink transfer, moire on scan.
Newspaper & Yearbook Photo Restoration - 02
Clean up the newspaper clipping scan
Removes scanner dust, borders and the color cast a flatbed adds to a newspaper clipping, and straightens it.
Scan Cleanup - 03
Restore the faces on the newspaper clipping
Recovers eye and skin detail at natural strength; small faces on a newspaper clipping are plausible reconstructions.
Face Restoration - 04
Upscale the newspaper clipping for reprinting
A newspaper clipping is small to begin with; the upscaler adds the pixels a frame-sized print needs.
Image Upscaler
Questions
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