Using Highlight/Midtone/Shadow To Fix Faded Photos

This procedure assumes that your monitor has been calibrated (Jasc's website has instructions on how to calibrate your monitor).

Note that this technique is for photos that are faded evenly. For photos that are faded in splotches, either use this technique with a feathered selection or use masks or adjustment layers (more advanced techniques that I may deal with in another tutorial). Results from this method are not perfect (I used it for the first time when coming up with this tutorial). I have not yet tried it with a photo that has faded too dark.

This tutorial uses the photo of Mrs. Bishop from the Miscellaneous Individuals from Ohio page of my "Antique Store People" section. For best results, use this .png file (837k). If that's a little too large for your connection to download in a decent amount of time, you can use this .jpg (38k) file, but be aware that enhancing the photo will also "enhance" all the JPG compression artifacts.

Mrs. Bishop has probably been kept out on display somewhere that she was exposed to light regularly and has faded quite a bit as a result.
Since Mrs. Bishop was a bit crooked in the scanner, the first thing I did was straighten her out. I first applied a grid to the image (menu itemView > Grid, not available in PSP 4) so that I could tell whether the edges of the photo were straight. I then rotated her to the right 0.5 degrees (menu item Image > Rotate, ). Pay careful attention to how the edges of the image (NOT the frame) line up with the grid. This may take some trial and error and rotation settings will probably be slightly different for every photo you do this to. When the photo looks as straight as you can get it, remove the grid by going to menu item View > Grid again.
Use the selection tool to select only the photo. This technique assumes that you're using a rectangular photograph. There is a way to make selections for irregularly shaped photos like ellipses (ovals) or arches, but I will deal with that in another tutorial since it involves a bit of vector shape editing.
Pull up the histogram display by typing the letter "H" on your keyboard (PSP 5 - 7, not available in PSP 4) or "F7" for PSP 8 and later. Note that this is NOT the same thing as PSP 7's Histogram Adjustment. Notice in the screenshots below that the histogram is "flatlined" on the left and right sides, with just a spike near the right side. This means that the image has no true black (left side of the graph) or white (right side of the graph) values and most of the information is concentrated in the light grey area of the graph. The shapes of the two histograms look slightly different because the histogram display for PSP 5 and 6 cannot be set to read only from a selected area - it shows a reading for the whole image file.

Histogram Window for PSP versions 5 and 6

Histogram Window for PSP 7

This is a histogram reading of a normal photo for comparison. The photo used for this histogram is not faded and has a fairly normal range of tones from black almost all the way to white. There is a slight "flatline" on the right side of the histogram, but this is barely noticeable in the actual photo.
Drag the Histogram display off to one side of your screen so that you can still see it, but where it won't get in your way. PSP 4 users may want to zoom in on an area with important detail in the image, like an eye, because their Highlight/Midtone/Shadow has no zoom in its preview window. Go to Colors > Adjust > Highlight/Midtone/Shadow. Make sure "auto-proof" is selected. If you're using PSP 6 or 7, make sure Linear Adjustment method is selected. The starting values before you make any adjustments should be Highlight = 100, Midtone = 50, Shadow = 0. This corresponds roughly to the histogram, where highlight values are on the right, shadow values are on the left and midtone values are in the center.

PSP 4

PSP 5

PSP 6

PSP 7
Watching both the Histogram display and the image file, make your adjustments. As you lower the highlight value, the image will get brighter and the flatline on the right side of the Histogram will begin to disappear. As you raise the shadow value, the shadow areas of the image will get darker and more details will begin to show. The flatline on the left side of the Histogram should have started to disappear, but did not on my computer in any version of PSP. I couldn't get the mid-tone slider to have any effect at all in PSP 5, 6, or 7 - it's probably best to ignore it and leave it set at 50. The values that seemed to work for me on this particular photograph were Highlight = 85, Midtone = 50, Shadow = 60. Your results may vary - fiddle with the highlight and shadow until you get a result you like.
It may help to find a dark or shadow area of the photo that you think should be black (the shadows at the corners of Mrs. Bishop's eyes or her collar just under her chin) raise the shadow value until it is. Find a highlight area of the photo that should ideally be white (maybe the sparkles on her pin or the blank area of the photo near the edges) and lower the highlight value until it looks right. Don't be afraid to use the zoom controls between the preview windows to zoom in on the photo if you need to check the detail in eyes, lips, hair, etc. Click "OK" when you have Mrs. Bishop looking the way you think she should.
On my computer, I got decent detail from this method, but the resulting image was badly oversaturated - what had been a mild sepia tone became a bright garish orange cast. If you get something similar, leave the selection in place and go to Color > Adjust > Hue/Saturation/Lightness (Hue/Saturation/Luminance in PSP 4) and lower the Saturation value until the violent orange becomes a nice subtle brown. This will probably be somewhere between -25 and -50. Use your own judgement as to what looks good to you.
Mrs. Bishop is looking much better than she was earlier. Just deselect (menu item Selections > Select None) and save her photo.