Restore Old Photo

This fixes fading. It cannot fix damage.

The distinction to understand before you start, because it decides whether this is the right tool for your photograph.

What it fixes, and fixes genuinely well: fading. An old print or slide loses contrast and colour saturation as the dyes break down, so it goes flat, washed out, and usually yellowish or pinkish. That is exactly a brightness, contrast and saturation problem — and correcting those is not an approximation of restoration, it is the restoration. A faded 1970s print can come back looking remarkably close to how it looked when it was new.

The same applies to a scan that came out grey and lifeless, an underexposed photograph, and anything with the dull haze that scanning often adds.

What it cannot fix: physical damage. Scratches, creases, tears, missing corners, water stains, mould, fingerprints, dust specks, and the cracking in old emulsion. Repairing those means reconstructing parts of the picture that are gone, which needs either a trained model or a person with a mouse and some patience. No slider will do it.

It also does not colourise — a black-and-white photograph stays black and white. If you want a colour version, that is a separate kind of tool. Colorize Image will give it a warm sepia tone, which is often a better-looking choice than a speculative colour version anyway.

So: faded, dull or flat? You are in the right place. Torn, scratched or stained? You need an AI restoration service, or a scan and some careful work in an image editor. It is worth knowing which before you spend time here.

Start with Auto Enhance, then adjust

The practical workflow, and it is the fastest route to a good result.

Click Auto Enhance first. It sets all four controls to reasonable values in one step, and for a typical faded photograph it gets you most of the way. Look at the before and after, and if you are happy, you are done.

Then adjust from there rather than from zero. Automatic corrections are a sensible average, and your photograph is not average — it will usually want a little less of something.

The most common correction after Auto Enhance is to pull the saturation back down. Automatic enhancement tends to overshoot colour, and an old photograph with vivid modern colour looks wrong in a way that is hard to place. Old photographs are supposed to look slightly muted; taking them to full saturation makes them look like a filter rather than a restoration.

What each control actually does for an old photo

Contrast is the one that does the real work, and the one to reach for first. Fading is loss of contrast — the blacks have drifted up to grey and the whites down to cream, so everything sits in a narrow band in the middle. Adding contrast pushes them back apart, and this single adjustment usually accounts for most of the improvement.

Watch the extremes as you go. Too much contrast and you lose detail permanently: shadows go solid black and highlights go blank white, and the information in them is gone for good. Stop at the point where you can still see detail in the darkest and lightest parts.

Brightness corrects an overall exposure problem — a print that is too dark, or a scan that came out murky. Use it after contrast, not before, and use less than you think. A brightened photograph can look washed out all over again, which is the problem you were trying to fix.

Saturation restores colour intensity. Faded dyes mean weak colour, so a lift here brings back what was there. The caution above applies: less is more, and a colour cast is a separate problem this cannot fix — if the whole photograph has gone pink or yellow, saturation makes the cast stronger, not weaker. For a badly cast photograph, consider going monochrome with Convert Image to Grayscale or leaning into it with a deliberate tone.

Sharpness comes last, and sparingly. It increases local contrast at edges, which makes a soft scan look crisper. But it cannot recover focus that was never there — an out-of-focus photograph stays out of focus — and pushed too far it produces bright outlines around everything and makes film grain and scanning noise far more obvious. Old photographs have plenty of both.

Use the before and after, properly

The feature that matters most and gets used least.

Restoration is judged by comparison, not in isolation. Work on a photograph for five minutes and your eye adapts completely — what looked dramatic starts looking normal, and you keep pushing. The before and after view is the corrective, and the way to use it is to flip back and forth repeatedly rather than glancing once.

Two questions to ask while flipping. Does it look better, or just different? More contrast and more colour is not automatically an improvement. And does it still look like a photograph from when it was taken? The goal is the photograph as it originally looked, not a modern photograph — a 1965 print that now looks like it was shot on a phone has gone too far.

If you are restoring several photographs from the same album or era, do them with similar settings so the set stays consistent.

Before you start: get the scan right

The single biggest factor in the final result, and it happens before this tool.

Scan at 600 DPI or higher, not 150. You cannot add detail later and a low-resolution scan permanently limits everything. For a small print, higher still.

Turn off your scanner's automatic corrections. Scanner software often applies its own sharpening, contrast and dust removal, which bakes in decisions you cannot undo. A flat, dull, honest scan is far better raw material than one the scanner has already "improved".

Clean the glass and the print — gently, with a dry soft brush for the print. Half the specks people try to remove digitally are dust that was on the scanner.

Keep the original scan file untouched, and work on a copy. Every adjustment here is permanent once saved, so your unedited scan is the negative.

Everything happens in your browser: no upload, no watermark, no account. That is worth stating for this tool in particular, because family photographs are among the most personal files anyone owns, and every AI restoration service requires you to hand them over.

Related tools

Colorize Image adds a sepia or colour tone, which suits a restored old photograph and is the honest alternative to colourisation. Sharpen Image offers more control over sharpening alone if that is all you need. Upscale Image enlarges a small scan, and its page is honest about what enlargement can and cannot do.