Photo Restore
Revive scanned and fading photos: fix colour casts, restore contrast, reduce noise and sharpen.
Runs in your browserInput
Drop your file here
Scanned prints and old digital photos both work.
or click to choose a file
About this tool
Bring scanned and ageing photos back to a usable state. The tool corrects the colour cast that comes from old paper, restretches contrast that has flattened over time, reduces film grain and sharpens what is left, then optionally doubles the resolution. Every step is ordinary image processing running on your own device.
How to use it
- 1Drop a scanned or faded photo.
- 2Leave auto white balance and auto contrast on, then adjust noise reduction and sharpening to taste.
- 3Download the restored image, with 2× enlargement if you need it.
Frequently asked questions
Can it repair tears, stains or missing areas?
No, and we would rather say so clearly. Reconstructing content that is not in the file requires a generative model guessing what was there, which is a different kind of tool. What this one does well is the very common case of a photo that has yellowed, flattened and gone grainy.
Why does the processing order matter?
Noise reduction has to run before sharpening. Sharpening first amplifies every speck of grain, and a denoise pass afterwards then softens the genuine detail you just emphasised — the two end up cancelling out and the photo looks worse than either alone.
Is the sharpening applied to the enlarged version?
Yes. The image is enlarged first, then sharpened, which is the correct order: sharpening at the small size and then enlarging would blur the sharpening away. If the enlarged result is very large the tool skips sharpening to keep the page responsive and tells you when it does.