Restore Old Photo

Drop in a scan of an old photo, get back a restored version: scratches healed, faded contrast restored, faces sharpened, blurs cleaned up. The model was trained on hundreds of thousands of pre-1980 photographs paired with their modern restorations, so it knows what a print from 1962 is supposed to look like before it weathered.

What it fixes

• Scratches and dust spots — from physical damage to the print itself.
• Fading and yellowing — colour casts from age, light exposure, or acidic paper.
• Soft focus and motion blur — partial recovery, especially on faces.
• Torn corners and missing edges — uses inpainting to plausibly reconstruct.
• JPEG and scan compression artefacts — denoised without smearing detail.

How to use it

1. Scan or photograph the original. Aim for as high resolution as you can — 600 DPI for prints, the highest setting for phone-camera shots.
2. Crop to the photo itself. Trim off the album page, mat, or background. Less material to process means a sharper result.
3. Upload. JPG, PNG, TIFF, HEIC, up to 25 MB.
4. Pick restoration strength. Light, balanced, aggressive. Aggressive can over-smooth real texture (pores, fabric weave); balanced is the safe default.
5. Download. Output is the same dimensions as input unless you also enable upscaling.

Combine with other tools

For very old or very damaged photos, run a workflow: Restore → Face Enhancer for sharper faces → 4× Upscale for printing big. Each step is non-destructive — the original stays in your account if you're signed in.

Black-and-white photos can be colourised separately as a different pass; we're rolling that out in the colour-tools group.

Privacy note

Old family photos are sensitive. Uploads are processed and deleted within 24 hours. They are never used for training, never shared, and never visible to other users.