I spent three days trying to fix the family photo by myself

Staring at the folder of old family photos

I have this folder on my external hard drive that I’ve been meaning to touch for at least three years. It is full of family photos from maybe fifteen years ago, back when digital cameras were still quite clunky and the resolutions were just… tiny by today’s standards. I remember sitting in the living room with my older brother, looking at these files. He made a joke about how blurry we all looked, like we were ghosts, and that really stuck with me. I felt like I needed to fix them, or at least try to make them look like something I wouldn’t be embarrassed to post on social media.

The learning curve of expensive software

I initially thought about just buying a subscription to the industry standard software, the one everyone knows, but then I looked at the monthly cost. It was around $20 to $30 a month depending on the plan, and honestly, for someone who only wants to fix twenty photos, that felt like a complete waste of money. I spent an entire Saturday afternoon trying to figure out how to use the layer masks and the healing brush tool. I thought it would be intuitive, but every time I tried to remove a scratch or fix the lighting on someone’s face, I just ended up making the skin look like plastic. It was far more tedious than those commercials make it seem.

Giving in to the AI tools

After getting frustrated with the manual approach, I started looking into those web-based AI editing tools. Some of them promised to upscale resolution and remove backgrounds with just one click. There is one site that charges about $5 per batch for ‘high quality’ enhancements, which sounded much better than spending hours watching tutorials on how to dodge and burn. But then the result came back looking way too smooth, like everyone had gone through some extreme cosmetic procedure. The AI had clearly misunderstood the texture of my father’s shirt and turned it into something that looked like digital noise. I spent another hour trying to blend it back, which felt like a massive cycle of undoing my own mistakes.

Realizing that professional retouching is different

I thought back to when my cousin got married and paid a studio for professional wedding photo retouching. At the time, I thought it was overpriced, but now, sitting here in my dimly lit room at 2 AM, I completely get why they charge what they do. It isn’t just about the software; it is about knowing how much to fix without making the people in the photo look like strangers. I tried to fix one specific photo taken at a park in Gyeonggi-do, where the sunlight was hitting my mother’s eyes directly. I must have spent three hours just on that one frame, jumping between basic color correction and trying to manually mask out the flare. It still doesn’t look quite right.

The lingering feeling of unfinished business

I still have about twelve photos left in that folder. The ones I managed to finish are sitting in a sub-folder labeled ‘fixed_v2’, but every time I look at them, I notice a stray hair or a shadow I missed. My brother asked me last week if I was done yet, and I just told him it was ‘in progress’. I am not sure if I am actually going to finish them. Maybe these photos were meant to stay a little bit blurry and imperfect. There is something about the way we looked back then that the editing software keeps trying to erase, and I am starting to wonder if I should just stop trying to make them perfect.