Image Denoiser
Clean grain from low-light photos. Set the options to suit you, and download the result at full resolution with no watermark.
Click anywhere in this box or drag a photo in. Set the options on the left, then hit Generate — your original stays untouched, you always see both.
+ Choose a photoSee it in action — real before & after
How to use Image Denoiser
Scan or photograph the print
A flatbed scan at 600 dpi is ideal. A phone photo works: lay the print flat, use indirect daylight, avoid your own shadow and any glare from the surface.
Choose the repair
Repair damage, correct faded colour, colourise a black-and-white original, or describe what the photo needs in a sentence.
Compare and download
Check the result against the scan at full size, then download at full resolution. Keep both — the scan is the document, the restoration is the reading of it.
Why use Image Denoiser
What Image Denoiser does
Clean grain from low-light photos.
Physical damage repaired
Cracks, tears, creases, scratches and missing corners reconstructed from the surrounding image rather than blurred over.
Faded colour corrected
The characteristic magenta and yellow shifts of ageing colour film are reversed, which recovers photos that look beyond saving.
Detail brought back out
Contrast that has flattened over decades is restored, and detail buried in dense shadow or a washed highlight is recovered.
Faces treated with care
The face is the reason the photo is being restored. Features are reconstructed conservatively rather than replaced with a generic plausible face.
Grain and noise handled properly
Film grain is reduced without smearing away the fine detail that sits at the same scale — the usual failure of automatic denoising.
What Image Denoiser changes
Remove digital noise and grain from this image while preserving genuine fine detail, edge sharpness and texture. Do not smear the result flat. Preserve the same person's recognizable identity from the uploaded reference: face shape, forehead, cheekbones, jawline, eye shape and spacing, eyebrows, nose, lips, natural asymmetry, age appearance, skin tone and distinctive features. Do not replace them with a generic AI face or beautify/idealize their features. Keep natural skin texture and pores; avoid waxy smoothing, exaggerated eyes, reshaped facial features and artificial symmetry. Change only what the app's requested transformation requires. For photographic results, use realistic camera detail: natural skin texture and pores, believable eyes and hair strands, coherent lighting and shadows, correct anatomy and perspective, and matching sharpness across face, neck and body. Avoid waxy skin, over-retouching, distorted features, face-morphing and pasted-on faces. If the app intentionally creates artwork, render the requested medium consistently across the whole image instead of forcing photorealism.
Your face, bone structure and skin tone are held fixed on every generation — only what is described above is changed.
Image Denoiser for the damage prints actually have
Different decades fail differently. A 1940s silver print, a 1975 colour snapshot and a 1998 disposable-camera photo each need a different repair.
Very small or low-resolution scans
Photos that exist now only as a small digital copy, sharpened and enlarged as far as the data honestly allows.
Damaged group and wedding photos
Often the only surviving image of several people, which makes conservative face reconstruction the priority.
Torn and creased prints
Fold lines, corner losses and surface scratches from decades in an envelope or an album.
Faded colour from the 60s to the 80s
Dye layers fade at different rates, which is why these photos go magenta. Reversing the shift is the single biggest improvement available.
Key highlights of Image Denoiser
Benefits
Nothing is risked
The print is never handled beyond being scanned, and the digital original is not modified.
Reprintable output
Resolution sufficient to reprint at a useful size and frame it.
Shareable with family immediately
The usual reason for restoring a photo is to send it to relatives who have never seen it clearly.
Colour and monochrome versions
Colourise for impact, keep the monochrome for accuracy. There is no need to choose one.
No subscription needed
A one-time pack whose credits never expire — or a monthly plan if you edit often.
What people use it for
What it is mainly used for
Clean grain from low-light photos. Set the options to suit you, and download the result at full resolution with no watermark.
Funeral and memorial displays
Usually needed at short notice, from whatever print the family can find.
Anniversary and birthday gifts
A restored and reprinted wedding photo is a better gift than almost anything bought new.
Genealogy and family archives
Restored images attached to a family tree, alongside the unaltered scans.
Local history and archive projects
Faded documentary photographs made legible for display or publication.
Prompt ideas
Describe the damage you can see and say what must not change. Restoration prompts fail when they are ambitious — asking for a photo to be "improved" invites the model to make a new one.
Describe the colour shift
"Remove the magenta cast from faded colour film and restore neutral skin tones" names the actual chemistry of the problem.
Protect the faces
"Reconstruct conservatively and keep the faces exactly as they are" is the most important line in any family restoration.
Say whether to colourise
"Keep it black and white" or "colourise with natural period-appropriate tones" — leaving it unsaid means the model decides.
Ask for era-plausible colour
"1950s colour palette, muted, no modern saturation" avoids a restoration that looks like a photo taken last year.
Address grain deliberately
"Reduce grain but keep detail in the fabric and hair" gets a better result than asking for it to be removed.
Mention the background separately
"Repair the water stain in the upper right of the background" isolates a fix that would otherwise affect the whole frame.
More about Image Denoiser
Each restoration costs 2 credits from a one-time pack. Working through a box of family prints one at a time is affordable, and the originals stay exactly as they are — nothing is overwritten.
Photographic prints are chemistry, and chemistry has a shelf life. Dyes shift, silver tarnishes, gelatine cracks, and damp does the rest. Most family boxes hold photographs that are twenty years from being unreadable. Image Denoiser is for the ones still legible enough to work from.
There is an important distinction between restoration and improvement, and it is worth holding onto. Restoration returns a photograph to what it looked like when it was made; improvement makes a nicer picture. Where damage destroyed information entirely, what fills the gap is inference, and it should be recognised as such.
Getting the best result from Image Denoiser
- Keep the unaltered scan permanently. It is the actual document; the restoration is an interpretation.
- Expect plausible reconstruction where damage destroyed detail, and look closely before treating those areas as recovered fact.
- For badly damaged photos, two conservative passes beat one aggressive one.
- If a face comes back wrong, re-run rather than accept it — variation between runs is significant on damaged sources.
- Start from the largest, least compressed original you have — a screenshot of a photo has already lost detail that cannot be recovered.
- Soft, even light in the source photo gives the best result almost regardless of what you are generating.
- Judge every result at full size, not zoomed out. Problems hide at small sizes.
- Generate two or three times before deciding. Results vary between runs, and the first is not reliably the best.
It runs online — nothing to install. Explore the rest of our AI Creative Apps, or open the full AI photo editor for more control.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the image denoiser work?
What photo should I upload?
Is the image denoiser free?
Will it still look like me?
Do you watermark the download?
Can it repair a photo that is torn or has a missing corner?
Will it change the faces?
Should I colourise, or keep it black and white?
How should I scan the print?
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