How to use
- Digitise the print. Scan it (600 DPI is ideal) or take a clear, glare-free phone photo of it in good light.
- Upload it to the tool — JPG, PNG or WEBP up to 8MB. The photo is downscaled and sent privately to your account.
- Pick a mode:
- Restore — repairs scratches, tears, stains and fading. Black-and-white photos stay black-and-white.
- Restore + Colorize — repairs the damage, then adds natural, historically plausible color.
- Face Enhance — sharpens and deblurs faces only, leaving the rest of the photo untouched.
- Compare and download. Check the side-by-side before/after, then download the restored PNG. Not happy? Switch modes and run again — each run uses 1 credit.
Tips for the best restoration
- Scan flat, not at an angle. Perspective distortion confuses the repair — a flat, square scan gives the cleanest result.
- Don’t crop too tight. Leave a little border around the print so torn edges and missing corners can be rebuilt.
- One photo per run. A scan with multiple prints in the frame restores worse than each print scanned alone.
- Start with Restore, then colorize. If a photo is badly damaged, the plain Restore mode is the most faithful starting point; colorization can always be a second run.
What restoration honestly can and can’t do
AI restoration is excellent at repairing surface damage — scratches, creases, stains, fading — and at recovering tonal range that decades of light exposure washed out. It is deliberately constrained here to not restyle, re-pose or beautify anyone: a restoration that changes your grandfather’s face isn’t a restoration.
What it can’t do is invent truth. If half a face is physically missing from the print, the AI would have to guess — and a guess is not your relative. For photos with severe, content-destroying damage, expect an improvement rather than a miracle, and always judge the before/after comparison yourself before printing.