Does Picsart photo restoration remove scratches and creases?

Picsart's restoration page promises to auto-fix "color fading, blurriness, smudges, and other blemishes" on damaged old photos, in seconds, with one tap. Run a soft, slightly faded print through it and the promise holds: the image comes back sharper, cleaner, and more saturated. For a photo whose only problem is softness, it is a good free tool and this page does not pretend otherwise.

The problem appears the moment the photo has physical damage. Shotkit tested the tool by hand and reported that it "doesn't remove scratches/creases," adding that "a photo restorer will care for scratches and creases – which the enhancer doesn't do," and concluding that Picsart's restoration "is essentially a photo enhancer being marketed as a restorer." Other testers describe lighter damage cleaning up nicely while results vary on more severe flaws, and note that the output can look artificial.

This is not a bug in Picsart. An enhancer works by increasing local contrast and detail. A crease is local contrast. Sharpening a creased print makes the crease a crisper line, because the tool has no concept of which edges are the photograph and which are the damage. Removing damage requires a model that recognises it as damage and reconstructs what was underneath from the surrounding image, which is a different job.

RestorePhotosApp only does that job. The restore style removes scratches, tears, creases, dust, and stains, corrects fading, and rebuilds detail in faces. Colorize adds colour to black-and-white originals. Cleanup, enhance, sharpen, deblur, and denoise cover the lighter cases. Every style assumes the input is an old photograph of people.

Picsart does have a way to remove a scratch: the Remove and Heal tools, which work like a clone-and-patch brush. You zoom into the print, trace each scratch with your finger or cursor, and let the tool fill it in. On one small blemish this takes a moment. On a 1950s portrait with a crease across the whole frame, a torn corner, and forty years of surface scuffing, it is an evening of work, and the result depends entirely on how steady and patient you are.

Two things make this worse at scale. The Remove and Heal tools sit behind a paid plan, so the free restoration that did not remove your scratches cannot be finished without subscribing. And the work does not transfer: every photo in the box needs the same manual pass again, by hand, one at a time.

This is the single clearest difference between the two tools. On RestorePhotosApp the damage removal is the automatic part. You upload the print, pick Restore, and the scratches and creases are gone in the result: no brushing, no zooming, nothing to trace. When there are forty prints, you drop all forty in at once.

If your photo is black and white, faded, and scratched, which describes most photos worth restoring, Picsart asks you to visit three places. The restoration tool for the enhancement pass. The image colorizer, a separate tool, for the colour. The Remove or Heal brush for the damage. Each step re-encodes the image and each step is a separate decision about how far to push it.

RestorePhotosApp's restore style does all three in one pass, and because a single model handles damage, colour, and faces together, they stay consistent with each other. Colour does not bleed across an edge that the damage pass has just rebuilt, because there was no separate damage pass.

If you only want colour and the print is otherwise fine, the colorize style is there on its own. The point is that the common case does not require you to assemble the result from three tools.

Picsart's Pro plan is $10.50 a month billed annually, or $15 month to month; Ultra is $37.50 a month billed annually, or $47 month to month. Both are fair prices for what Picsart is. Pro includes background removal, bulk editing, 100 GB of storage, and a long list of AI tools, and Ultra adds well over a hundred AI models. If you edit images every week, it is good value.

It fits a weekend of photo repair badly, and there is a detail in the credit system that matters here: Picsart states that monthly subscription credits expire at the end of each billing cycle, while separately purchased add-on credits never expire. So the generative allowance you did not use in the month you were scanning the box is simply gone.

RestorePhotosApp charges per restoration, once. Ten credits are $6.99, twenty-five are $16.99, fifty are $29.99, and a hundred are $54.99, which works out at $0.55 a photo on the largest pack. Credits never expire, there is no plan to cancel, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. Restoring forty prints costs $29.99 and leaves credits over for the next box.

Someone scans a portrait of their grandmother from 1958. It is black and white, the colour has gone brown at the edges, there is a crease running from her shoulder to the corner, and the print has spent decades in a wallet, so the surface is covered in fine scuffs. They find Picsart's Photo Restoration tool, upload it, and get a result in seconds: sharper, brighter, more contrast. The crease is still there and now reads as a hard white line. The scuffs are crisper too.

They read that the fix is the Remove tool, subscribe to Pro, and spend twenty minutes zoomed in tracing the crease. It mostly works. Then they remember there are thirty-nine more photos in the shoebox, and that the portrait is still black and white, which is a different tool again.

The same scan goes through RestorePhotosApp on Restore. The crease and the scuffs are gone, the brown cast is corrected, her face has detail in it again, and it comes back in colour: one upload, one pass. They buy the Family pack for $29.99, drop in the rest of the shoebox, and download the finished set with credits still left over.

Picsart is a very good product being asked to do something it was not built for. Its enhancer improves soft photos and its editor is excellent, but the tool named Photo Restoration enhances rather than restores, and reviewers who test it on real damaged prints say so consistently. The scratches come out sharper, and the actual repair is manual work behind a subscription.

If your photos are merely soft, use Picsart and pay nothing. If they are creased, torn, stained, faded, or black and white, that is what RestorePhotosApp is for. Two free restorations are enough to settle it on your hardest photo. For the wider field, see our best photo restoration apps guide and the comparison hub.