How to Restore a Damaged Photo
Start with the scan, not the repair
Every restoration begins with a scan, and a bad scan cannot be rescued later. Use at least 300 DPI, scan in colour even for a black-and-white photo, and lay the print flat without pressing on creases. If the photo is torn, scan the pieces separately and keep them in order.
Skipping this step is the single most common reason a restoration looks soft. No tool recovers detail that was never captured.
Fix damage in this order
Tears, stains and creases interact. Doing them out of order means redoing work.
- Surface dirt first. Dust and fingerprints confuse every later step, including AI.
- Structural damage second. Join torn sections before touching tone or colour.
- Tone and contrast third. Water stains read as uneven density, and fixing them before contrast work leaves the contrast wrong afterwards.
- Colour last. Once tone is even, colour correction has a stable base to sit on.
What AI handles well, and what it does not
| Damage | AI alone | Needs a human |
|---|---|---|
| Scratches and dust | Handles well | Rarely |
| Fading and colour shift | Handles well | Colour accuracy for skin and uniforms |
| Torn edges | Fills with plausible content | Anything from a specific person or object |
| Missing faces or figures | Not reliable | Always |
The honest line: AI reconstructs plausible texture, not specific truth. For a landscape or a brick wall that is fine. For a face, a plausible reconstruction is a different person.
Water stains need a different approach
Water damage is not a mark on top of the image, it is a change in the paper. The stain often shows as a lightened or yellowed region with a tide line. Removing the tide line is easy; restoring the detail underneath is not, because that detail may not exist in the scan at all.
Accept that severe water damage is partly an interpretation job. Match the underlying detail to the surrounding areas rather than inventing new texture.
Working with creases
A crease is a lighting artefact. If you can rescan with light from two directions instead of one, the crease often weakens on its own. That is faster and more faithful than removing it in software.
Keep an untouched original
Always work on a copy. Restoration is judgement, and judgement changes. Keep the raw scan untouched so you can start again when a better approach appears.
FAQ
- Can AI repair a torn photo with a missing piece? It can fill the area with something plausible, but it cannot know what was there. Treat the result as a reconstruction, not a record.
- Why does my restored photo look over-smoothed? Usually because denoising was applied too early, before tone correction. Strong denoising before contrast work flattens real detail along with the damage.
- What scan resolution do I need? 300 DPI minimum, 600 DPI if you plan to print. Higher than 600 rarely helps and slows everything down.
- Can I restore a photo from a phone photo of a print? Sometimes, if the lighting is even and there is no glare. Lens distortion and perspective are usually the limiting factors.
Start from a clean 300 DPI scan and work through the order above. OldPhoto handles scratches, fading and colour shift in the browser, and you can see the full workflow on the app page.