Photo Restoration Guide

What restoration fixes

The Photo Restoration tool repairs cracks and scratches, rebuilds faded areas, and sharpens soft detail in old or damaged images - the kind of work that used to take hours of manual retouching.

Start with a clean scan

Restoration can only work with what it is given. Scan prints flat at a high resolution, avoid glare, and capture the whole photo. A sharp scan of a damaged print restores far better than a quick phone snapshot of it.

Restore, then finish

Restoration is usually step one. After repairing damage, upscale for size, run the enhancer to refine tone, or add natural colour with the Photo Colorizer to bring a black-and-white memory to life.

Realistic expectations

Severe damage may not fully recover, and restoration reconstructs plausible detail rather than the exact original. The better the source scan, the more faithful the result.

Capturing damaged prints without a scanner

No flatbed scanner? A phone camera can produce a restorable capture if you control the light. Lay the print on a flat, neutral surface, light it with soft, even daylight from a window rather than a direct flash that bounces glare off the gloss, and shoot straight down so the photo fills the frame square-on. For glossy or curled prints, hold them flat under a sheet of glass, or tilt slightly to dodge reflections. Take a few versions and keep the sharpest. Higher megapixels help, but even lighting and focus matter more than raw resolution. Once captured, the Photo Restoration tool has a clean source to rebuild from - and you can upscale afterwards to recover size.

What different kinds of damage need

Not all damage responds the same way, so it helps to know what you are dealing with:

• Surface scratches and tears: reconstructed well, since surrounding detail guides the fill
• Fading and yellowing: tone and contrast are rebuilt, often dramatically
• Water stains and mould: partially recoverable depending on how much underlying image survives
• Missing corners or large holes: the tool invents plausible content, so treat it as an approximation

For black-and-white originals, restore the damage first and only then add colour with the Photo Colorizer, so the colour pass works on clean tones rather than over scratches and stains.