You scan an old art print, open the file, and something's off. The blues have gone grey, the warm tones have drifted toward brown, and the whole thing looks like it's been sitting in a sunny window for two decades. It probably has. Faded color is the most common problem in scanned artwork, and it's also the one that quietly wrecks conversion passes if you skip past it.
Here's the thing worth understanding: a style pass or conversion reads the colors in your file and builds on them. If you feed it dull, shifted color, it doesn't fix the fade — it commits to it. The tool over on our homepage will faithfully carry those greyed-out blues into the new version. Recovering the original color first is what keeps a conversion from inheriting two decades of damage.
How to tell a faded scan from a badly shot one
Not all dull scans are faded. A scan shot with the wrong white balance will look cool and washed out, but the color relationships inside the artwork are still intact. A genuinely faded print loses saturation unevenly — blues and yellows fade fastest, so a once-vibrant teal reads as a muddy grey-green while the reds stay relatively strong.
The quick test: find a part of the image that should be a deep, saturated color and look at whether it has any punch left. If the darkest blue in your print is basically grey, that's fade. If it's a proper blue but the whole file feels cold, that's a white balance issue and it'll correct in one move.
Restore the color, don't invent it
This is where people go wrong. Restoration isn't about making the print look like whatever you'd like it to be. It's about pulling the color back toward what's plausible for the original, using whatever reference the image still gives you. The greens in the foliage. The warm note in the paper. Those surviving hints tell you which direction to push.
Work in small moves. A faded print has lost saturation across the board, so bringing life back usually means gently raising saturation and nudging the color balance back toward neutral, letting the surviving colors anchor the correction. Overshoot and you get the neon, oversaturated look that screams "fixed in an app."
Fix the paper tone too
Old paper yellows, and that yellow casts over everything. A scan of an aged print will have a warm color cast baked into what should be the whites. If you correct the artwork's colors but leave the paper yellow, the whole image still feels aged in an unflattering way. Set your white point on a part of the image that should be neutral — the paper itself, usually — and let the cast fall away.
Now decide: restore and stop, or restore and convert
Once the color is back, you have a clean file, and that's the right moment to decide what it needs next. If the artwork's strength is the artwork itself, stop here. You've done the useful work. If the goal is a new version — a different style, a modern colour treatment, a printed product — now the conversion starts from a file with real color, and it'll carry that strength forward instead of reproducing the fade.
The order matters more than people expect: restore first, convert second. Doing it the other way means every style pass is a copy of a damaged original, and you end up restoring a conversion rather than the source.
A note on judging your own work
Step away from the screen and come back. Faded scans are easy to overcorrect because while you're working, your eye adapts to the new saturation and keeps asking for more. Save, close, and look again ten minutes later. If it now looks like a fresh print rather than a rescued one, you've hit the mark. Showing the before and after side by side is the fastest way to catch an overshoot.
Restoration is the unglamorous step that makes everything after it better. Handle the color first, and any conversion you run on top will have something worth converting. If you want to see how restored scans behave through a conversion pass, the examples on our main site walk through the whole sequence.