🖼️ Repair scratches, fading and creases.

Old Photo Restoration

Repair scratches, fading and creases. Set the options to suit you, and download the result at full resolution with no watermark.

🖼️

Upload a photo to start

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 photo

JPG · PNG · WEBP, up to 10MB

See it in action — real before & after

Old Photo Restoration — before and after — Made with Old Photo Restoration — the same thing your upload goes through.

How to use Old Photo Restoration

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 Old Photo Restoration

What Old Photo Restoration does

Repair scratches, fading and creases.

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.

Colourisation available

Black-and-white originals can be colourised with period-plausible tones, and the monochrome version is still there afterwards.

Print-ready resolution

Enough resolution to reprint and frame, which is what most people restoring a photo intend to do with it.

What Old Photo Restoration changes

Restore this damaged photograph: repair scratches, tears, creases and spotting, rebuild missing areas consistently with their surroundings, correct the fading and recover contrast and fine detail — without inventing new features that were never in the original. Unless keeping it black and white is asked for below, bring a faded, sepia or black-and-white photo back into natural, believable colour. 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.

Old Photo Restoration 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 Old Photo Restoration

Benefits

No specialist to find or pay

Professional photo restoration runs from $20 to well over $100 per image and takes days. This is a minute and a couple of credits.

Work through a whole box

Because the per-photo cost is small, restoring forty prints is a realistic weekend rather than a commission.

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.

What people use it for

What it is mainly used for

Repair scratches, fading and creases. Set the options to suit you, and download the result at full resolution with no watermark.

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.

Damaged wedding albums

Albums from the 70s and 80s where the adhesive pages have discoloured the prints themselves.

Reprinting for a frame

A restored file at print resolution, sent to any printing service.

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.

Keep it short

Three or four specific clauses beat a paragraph. Long prompts dilute every instruction in them, including the one you cared about.

Name the framing

Close-up, head and shoulders, full body, centred, offset. Framing decides what the image is actually of.

Avoid asking for text in the image

Generated lettering is still unreliable. Ask for empty space where the text should go and add real type afterwards.

Pick the ratio first

Generating square and cropping to vertical throws away part of the frame. Choose the shape before you generate.

Try another model

If a prompt is being ignored, switching between Nano Banana Pro, GPT Image and Seedream 4.5 often resolves it faster than rewording.

Describe the light

Direction, softness and colour temperature. Light does more to how a photograph feels than any other single thing you can specify.

More about Old Photo Restoration

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. Old Photo Restoration 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 Old Photo Restoration

Photographing a print works: lay it flat, use indirect daylight, and keep your shadow and any glare out of the frame.
Remove the print from behind glass before scanning — reflections are read as part of the image.
Crop to the photograph itself, not the album page or the mount around it.
Do one repair at a time and check each result at full size.
Always say "keep the faces as they are" for family photos. Faces are where invention is least welcome.
For faded colour, correct the cast before attempting anything else.
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.

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 old photo restoration work?

Repair scratches, fading and creases. Upload your image, set the options on the left — they are written into the instruction the AI receives — then hit Generate. You see the original and the result side by side, so you can always compare before downloading.

What photo should I upload?

A clear, front-facing, well-lit photo gives the most faithful result. Heavy sunglasses, extreme angles and deep shadows all make the face harder to preserve.

Is the old photo restoration free?

The free tools on this site are unlimited. This one is an AI app, so it uses credits. Each generation costs 2 credits. Packs start at $2, they are a one-time purchase and they never expire.

Will it still look like me?

That is the instruction the prompt leads with: keep the face, bone structure and skin tone exactly, and change only the styling. If a result drifts, run it again — generation is not deterministic, and a second pass usually lands.

Do you watermark the download?

No. Every export is full resolution with nothing added, on any pack.

Can it repair a photo that is torn or has a missing corner?

Yes. Tears, creases, scratches and missing areas are reconstructed from the surrounding image. Where the damage removed information entirely, the fill is plausible reconstruction rather than recovery — so look closely at those areas before treating them as a record of what was there.

Will it change the faces?

It is tuned to reconstruct faces conservatively, and adding "keep the faces exactly as they are" to the prompt reinforces that. On heavily damaged faces some interpretation is unavoidable; if a result does not look like the person, run it again, because variation between runs on damaged sources is significant.

Should I colourise, or keep it black and white?

Both — they are separate runs and nothing is overwritten. Colourisation makes an old photo feel immediate and is what most people share. The monochrome version is the accurate one. Keeping both is the usual answer.

How should I scan the print?

A flatbed scan at 600 dpi, print taken out from behind any glass, cropped to the photograph itself. A phone photo is a perfectly good substitute if the print is flat, the light is indirect daylight and there is no glare or shadow across it.