Old Photo Restoration
Repair scratches, fading and creases. Pick a style, choose a model, and download the result at full resolution with no watermark.
Pick a style on the left, then hit Apply. Your original stays untouched — you always see both.
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.
See it in action — real before & after
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 — without inventing new features that were never in the original.
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. Pick a style, choose a model, 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 the other model
If a prompt is being ignored, switching between Nano Banana and GPT Image 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's free to try and runs online — nothing to install. Explore the rest of our AI Creative Apps, or open the full AI photo editor for more control.
