How to Restore Old Photos:
Scan, Repair and Enhance

How to Restore an Old Photo

Restoring an old photograph with AI takes three steps. No photo editing skills are needed — the AI handles the technical work of sharpening, denoising, and upscaling automatically.

1. Scan or photograph the old print. Use a flatbed scanner at 300 DPI or higher for the best results. If you do not have a scanner, photograph the print with your phone camera in bright, even light. Place the photo on a flat surface and hold the camera directly above it to avoid perspective distortion. Avoid using flash — it creates glare spots that the AI cannot remove.
2. Upload to the AI Photo Enhancer. Drag and drop the scanned image or phone capture onto the upload area. The tool accepts JPG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, and BMP files up to 20 MB.
3. Enhance with the Quality model. It runs Real-ESRGAN x4plus and enlarges the scan 4x. Click “Enhance Photo”, wait for the AI to finish and download the restored PNG.

What AI Can Restore

AI photo restoration works by analyzing the existing pixel data in an image and intelligently reconstructing detail that has been lost to age, compression, or low resolution. Here is what the AI handles well:

Scanning Tips for Old Photos

The quality of your restoration depends heavily on the quality of the source scan. A good scan gives the AI more data to work with, producing a dramatically better result. Here are practical tips for scanning old prints:

• Scan at 300 DPI minimum. 300 DPI captures enough detail for most standard-size prints (4×6 inches, 5×7 inches). For smaller prints like wallet photos or passport pictures, scan at 600 DPI to give the AI more pixels to work with. Higher DPI means larger file sizes, but the restoration quality improves substantially.
• Use a flatbed scanner. Flatbed scanners produce the sharpest, most uniform results because the photo lies flat on a glass surface directly against the sensor. Sheet-fed scanners can scratch delicate old prints and introduce slight motion blur. If you do not own a scanner, many public libraries and office supply stores offer flatbed scanning services.
• Avoid glare and reflections. If photographing the print with a phone instead of scanning, work in diffused natural light (near a window on an overcast day, or in shade). Direct sunlight and indoor lamps create glare spots — bright white patches where the light reflects off the glossy photo surface. These patches contain no image data and cannot be restored by AI.
• Clean the scanner glass and the photo. Dust, fingerprints, and smudges on the glass or photo surface show up as dark spots or blurry patches in the scan. Wipe the glass with a microfiber cloth. Handle old photos by the edges to avoid fingerprints. For very delicate or fragile prints, use cotton gloves.
• Crop before uploading. Remove the scanner border (the area outside the photo edge) before uploading to the enhancer. The AI processes the entire image — including blank borders — which wastes processing power and can affect the enhancement quality if the border is much brighter or darker than the photo itself.
• Save as PNG, not JPEG. PNG uses lossless compression, preserving every detail from the scan. JPEG compression introduces artifacts — blocky patterns and color banding — especially at quality settings below 90%. These artifacts are particularly visible in smooth areas like skin and sky, and the AI has to spend effort removing them instead of enhancing the actual photo content.

Before and After: What to Expect

AI photo restoration produces impressive results, but it is important to have realistic expectations about what the technology can and cannot do. Here is an honest summary:

What the AI does well:

• Sharpening and detail recovery. Faces that were soft or slightly out of focus become noticeably clearer. You can often see facial features, clothing textures, and background elements that were barely visible in the original.
• Noise and grain reduction. Film grain and scanner noise are reduced or eliminated, producing a smoother, cleaner image. The AI distinguishes between grain (random noise) and actual detail (textures, edges), so it removes one without losing the other.
• Resolution upscaling. A small, low-resolution scan can be enlarged to 2x or 4x its original size with genuine detail added — not the blurry stretching you get from simple resizing in a photo editor.
• Compression cleanup. Blocky JPEG artifacts from old scans and re-saved copies are smoothed out in the same pass.

What the AI does not do:

• Colorization. The enhancer does not add color to black and white photographs. If you upload a grayscale image, you will receive a sharper, cleaner grayscale image. Colorization requires a completely different AI model.
• Scratch and tear removal. Physical damage — scratches, creases, torn corners, water stains, mold spots — requires inpainting, which is a separate restoration technique. The AI enhancer improves image quality but does not fill in missing or damaged areas of the photo.
• Recreating lost information. If a section of the photo is completely white from sun bleaching or completely black from underexposure, there is no pixel data for the AI to enhance. The result will still be blank in those areas, just at higher resolution.

Preserving Family Photos Digitally

Restoring an old photo is only half the job. Preserving it properly ensures that future generations can enjoy these images without having to repeat the restoration process. Here is a brief guide to digital photo preservation:

1. Scan all your old prints. Physical photos degrade continuously — every year they sit in a shoebox, they lose a little more contrast and sharpness. Scanning creates a digital copy that freezes the image at its current state. Even if you do not restore the photos immediately, having digital scans protects against further degradation, fire, flood, and loss.
2. Restore the scans with AI. Use the AI Photo Enhancer to improve each scan. Each photo takes a short wait and can look much clearer afterwards. Process the most important photos first — family portraits, milestone events, photos of relatives who are no longer alive.
3. Save in high quality. Store both the original unedited scan and the AI-enhanced version. Use PNG for archival copies (lossless, no quality loss over time). JPEG at 95% quality is acceptable for sharing copies. Keep the originals at full resolution — never downsample your archival copies.
4. Organize with dates and names. Rename files with dates and descriptions: 1965-grandma-garden.png is far more useful than scan0047.jpg. Add metadata or keep a simple text file with names, dates, and locations for each photo. This context is as valuable as the image itself — future generations will not know who the people are without it.
5. Back up to cloud storage. Upload your restored photos to at least one cloud storage service — Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, or OneDrive. This protects against hard drive failure, theft, and natural disasters. For additional safety, keep a backup on an external hard drive stored at a different physical location (a relative's house, a safe deposit box).

How to Repair Scratches, Tears and Fading

The AI enhancer does not fill in missing areas. Do that first in a photo editor, then run the repaired scan through the enhancer.

Photoshop

1. Use the Spot Healing Brush (J) on dust and thin scratches.
2. Use the Clone Stamp (S) for tears and missing corners: Alt/Option-click a clean area, then paint over the damage.
3. Fix fading with Image → Adjustments → Levels or Curves.
4. Photoshop 2022 and later also offer Filter → Neural Filters → Photo Restoration.

GIMP (free)

1. Use the Heal tool (H) for spots and scratches.
2. Use the Clone tool (C) for larger damage.
3. Fix fading with Colors → Levels or Colors → Curves.

DIY vs Professional Photo Restoration

Keep the original print safe whichever route you choose. Scanning it once at a good resolution means you never need to handle it again.