For families and archivists
Restoring Old Family Photos
Scan the print, upload it, and get back a version where the faces are legible again. Most people are doing this for one specific photograph, so the goal here is to get that one right rather than to batch a shoebox.
What happens to a print over forty years
Colour prints from the 1970s and 1980s were never archival. The dyes shift toward magenta or yellow, contrast flattens, and the emulsion picks up scratches and creases from being handled and moved between houses. Black-and-white prints hold up better but were often small, so the grain is as large as the detail you want.
The result is the situation most people are actually in: there are only three or four photographs of someone, and in all of them the face is soft. A professional restoration studio will fix it by hand for roughly $50 to $200 per image depending on the damage, with a wait of a week or more, which is reasonable for one heirloom and impractical for a folder of them.
AI restoration works differently. It reconstructs plausible detail based on what it knows about faces, fabric and film grain, which is why it is fast and why it needs a sanity check. It is very good at grain, fading, colour cast and softness. It is unreliable when the information is genuinely gone.
Scan at the highest resolution your scanner offers before starting. Everything downstream depends on the quality of that first capture, and a phone photograph of a print under a ceiling light throws away detail you cannot get back later.
How to restore a photograph
The whole process takes a few minutes per image once the print is scanned.
Scan, do not photograph
Use a flatbed scanner at 600 DPI or higher and save as PNG or TIFF. If you must use a phone, shoot in indirect daylight, square to the print, with no flash and no shadow across the surface.
Upload to the enhancer
Open the AI Image Enhancer and upload the scan. Start with the restore and upscale pass before doing anything else to the file.
Check the face against your memory
Look closely at the eyes, mouth and hairline. If the reconstruction has changed the person's features, go back to the original scan rather than accepting a face that is not theirs.
Enlarge and print
Upscale the approved version for print size, then order the print. Keep the original scan file untouched alongside it so the archive still holds what the photograph actually looked like.
One photograph, two routes
| Traditional | With Nano Banana | |
|---|---|---|
| Per image | $50–$200 hand restoration | Included in your plan |
| Turnaround | Several days to weeks | Minutes |
| A folder of 30 | Rarely worth commissioning | One sitting |
| Trying a second version | Charged again | Rerun with different settings |
| Severe physical damage | Still the better option | Mixed results, verify carefully |
Studio figures are typical market rates for hand restoration and are shown for comparison only. Hand retouching by a skilled restorer is still the better choice for severely damaged or historically significant images.
What else people restore
Faded and colour-shifted prints
Recover neutral colour from prints that have gone magenta or yellow, and bring back contrast that flattened out over decades.
Restore a photo →Small or low-resolution scans
Enlarge a wallet-sized print or an early digital camera file to something that holds up framed on a wall.
Upscale an image →Removing a distracting background
Isolate a person from a cluttered room so a single portrait can be printed cleanly for a memorial or an album page.
Remove a background →Editing out damage and objects
Describe what to remove — a crease across a face, a date stamp burned in by the camera, a stain — and regenerate that area.
Edit a photo →Gentle motion for a memorial slideshow
Animate a still portrait into a few seconds of subtle movement for a family slideshow. Many families find this moving and some find it uncomfortable, so ask first.
Animate a photo →Illustrated versions for gifts
Turn a restored photograph into an illustrated style for a calendar, a card or a framed print.
Restyle a photo →Questions about restoration
Does it invent detail that was not in the photograph?
Can it colourise a black-and-white photo?
What resolution should I scan at?
Can it fix a torn photograph?
Is my family photo used to train anything?
Can I print the result large?
Start with the one that matters
Scan the single photograph you most wish were clearer and run it through once. Free credits cover it, and you will know within a minute whether the face comes back.
Restore a photo free