Old photo restoration, step by step

Can an old photo be restored?

Picture restoration, photo restoration and old photo restoration all name the same job, and nothing below changes depending on which word brought you here.

Almost always, and usually better than people expect. Scratches, creases, tears, water stains, fading and soft focus are all recoverable, because the information needed to repair them is still present in the parts of the photograph around the damage. A model that has seen millions of undamaged photographs can work out what belongs in the gap.

What cannot be recovered is anything that was never captured. A face in a torn-off corner, the true color of a dress in a black and white frame, a licence plate too small for the film to resolve: those get filled in convincingly rather than recovered, and the difference matters. That line is drawn properly in what it invents below.

The rest of this is the practical order of work: get a good scan, pick the right operation, check the result, keep the original. Most disappointing restorations fail at the first of those, not the second.

Step 1: get a good scan

More people search for how to scan old photos than for how to restore them, which is the right instinct. Nothing downstream can add detail your scan did not capture, so this step sets the ceiling for everything else.

Save as TIFF or maximum-quality JPEG. Every re-save of a normal JPEG throws away a little more detail, and you only get to scan the print once.

Clean the glass and the print. Dust on the scanner bed becomes dust in the file, and a restoration model will faithfully treat it as part of the photograph. A soft brush on the print and a microfibre cloth on the glass takes a minute and removes work later.

No scanner? A phone is fine. Put the print on a flat surface near a window, turn the flash off, and hold the camera parallel to the photograph rather than at an angle. Keep your own shadow out of the frame, which usually means standing to the side of the light rather than between it and the print. A careful phone photo restores better than a careless scan.

One thing worth doing while the prints are out of the album: scan the back as well if anything is written on it. Names and dates in a relative's handwriting are the part nobody can reconstruct later, and they are lost far more often than the image is.

Step 2: restore it

With a decent scan in hand the actual restoration is short. These are the five steps, and the only one people skip is the fourth.

1. Get the photo into the computer. Scan it at 600 dpi, or photograph it with a phone in flat daylight. This step decides the ceiling for everything after it, which is why it has its own section above.
2. Say what is wrong with it. Damage, softness and missing color are different operations. Picking Restore on a faded print and Colorize on a black and white one gets a better result than running everything through one general enhancer.
3. Run it, and wait about thirty seconds. The model fills the damaged regions from the surrounding detail, rebuilds the faces, and predicts color where there is none. Nothing about this needs an editor or a plugin.
4. Check it at full size before you trust it. Open the download at 100 percent and look at the faces and the hands. This is where invented detail shows up, and it is a thirty-second check that saves you printing something wrong.
5. Keep the original scan. The scan is the document and the restoration is an interpretation of it. Keep both, and never throw away the file the scanner produced.

If the photograph is both damaged and black and white, repair it before adding color, never the other way round. A scratch reads to a colorization model as the edge of an object, so it paints along the line and leaves a colored stripe that is harder to remove than the scratch was. A tool that does both in one pass handles that ordering for you; there is more on the colour side in colorizing black and white photos.

What it repairs, and what it invents

This is the section most guides leave out, and it is the one that decides whether you will be happy with the result. Some of a restored photograph is recovered from information that was always there. Some of it is a confident guess. Both look equally real.

The practical rule: keep the original scan, and say so when you share the result. Nobody minds being told that the colors are an interpretation, and it stops a predicted blue dress becoming family fact two generations later.

Doing it on a phone

The prints are usually in a box and the camera is already in your hand, so the phone is where most of this starts. There is no need to install anything: ours runs in Safari and Chrome on iOS and Android and gives the same result as on a laptop, because the work happens on a server rather than on the handset.

The phone-specific advice is all about the capture rather than the restoring. Flat surface, daylight, flash off, camera parallel to the print, your shadow out of the frame. If the print is glossy and the reflection will not go away, tilt the print slightly rather than the camera, then straighten the result when you crop.

For a whole box rather than a handful, a dedicated scanning app is worth it: it detects several prints on a table at once, crops and deskews them. We compare the options in the photo restoration app comparison.

Doing it by hand in Photoshop

It is a fair question and the honest answer is that Photoshop will beat any AI on a photograph that matters, if you have the hours. There is no Restore button: the manual method is the Spot Healing Brush and the Clone Stamp for the damage, Curves for the fading, and a great deal of patience around hair and faces.

Two to four hours per photograph is normal for someone competent, which is the same labour a professional charges for. For one irreplaceable photograph that is time well spent. For the forty others in the box it is a month of evenings, which is the whole reason this category exists.

Paying a professional

Hand restoration runs $50 to $150 per photograph with a turnaround of a few days, and more for complex work such as rebuilding a face from a torn fragment. That is a fair price for two to four hours of skilled work, and for the right photograph it is the correct answer.

It is the correct answer when the photograph is genuinely destroyed rather than damaged, when a specific colour has to be right and you know what it was, or when the result is going to be printed large and hung on a wall. A human can be told that the uniform was Royal Navy blue. A model cannot know it.

It is the wrong answer for volume. At $100 a photograph a box of forty is $4,000 and several months, against about $0.44 a photograph and an evening. Most people end up doing both: everything through the automated route, and the two or three that really matter sent to a person.

As for drugstore and supermarket photo counters, they are built around printing and scanning rather than restoration. Where restoration is offered it is usually sent out and priced like professional work. They are genuinely useful for the scanning step if you do not own a scanner, but services vary by branch and change often, so call the specific store.

What it costs to do it here

One credit restores one photo, and a credit is between $0.44 and $0.70 depending on the pack. There is no subscription: the packs are a one-time purchase and the credits do not expire, which matters because nobody restores photographs steadily. People do twenty the week a shoebox turns up and nothing for six months.

An animation costs 3 credits rather than one, because it is a video model. Results stay in your history for 30 days so a second download never costs a second credit, the output is 1080p with no watermark, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. You sign in with Google and we never ask for a card until you pick a pack.

If you meant deleted photos

Worth separating, because the same word covers two unrelated problems and search engines mix them up. This page is about repairing a photograph that is damaged. Recovering a photograph that was deleted from a phone or a memory card is a different job, done with different software, and nothing here will help with it.

The short version for that problem: look in the Recently Deleted album on an iPhone or the Bin in Google Photos first, because both hold files for around 30 days. After that it is file recovery software on the card, and the chance of success drops every time the device writes anything new. Stop using the card and deal with it immediately.

Questions people ask