Photo restorer, for old and blurry faces.

To restore an old photo online, you need something that repairs three different problems: soft or blurry faces, a dull or noisy picture, and physical damage such as scratches and tears. This photo restorer handles the first two on its own and the third with a brush you control. It runs on your computer inside the browser tab, so a family photo never goes to a server.

How to use the photo restorer

1. Drop your photo on the box, paste it, or click to choose. A scan or a phone picture of a print both work. Crop away the white border first if there is one.
2. Wait a moment while the page looks for faces. The first visit downloads the AI engine, about 27 MB, and your browser keeps it. Each face found gets a number on the photo. Click a number to leave that face out, for example a spot that is not really a face.
3. Check the settings on the right. Face strength, the clean-up of the rest, the size and colour are all explained below.
4. If the photo has scratches, press Paint over scratches, set the Brush size and paint over them. This is optional.
5. Press Restore the photo. The first time, the face model downloads, 74 MB, and is kept in your browser. The page then rebuilds each face one at a time and shows how long it took.
6. Drag the line across the picture to compare Before and After. Below it, each face is shown before and rebuilt, side by side, so you can look closely.
7. Move Face strength to taste, then press Download the photo. The file name ends in -restored.

What each step does

The face step works on each face separately. The page finds the eyes, nose and mouth corners, turns and scales the face to a fixed upright size, and gives it to RestoreFormer++, an open face restoration model. It returns a clean face, which the page matches to the colour cast of your photo and blends back through a soft oval, so there is no hard edge. Because the model rebuilds the face from what it has learned about faces, it can add detail that was never in the photo.

The clean-up step uses Real-ESRGAN, a small open model that removes noise and sharpens the whole picture. With Size set to 2x or 4x it also enlarges the picture, and the rebuilt faces are placed on top at that larger size so they stay crisp. Large photos are limited to about 16.7 million pixels in total.

The colour step uses DDColor, the same model as the colorize photo page. It guesses natural colours for a black and white photo. The guess is not a record of the real colours.

Face strength

Honest limits

• Faces are rebuilt, not recovered. A blurry face holds less information than the model puts back. The result is a likely face. It can look smoothed, a little too young or clean, or not quite like the person. Compare with the original and lower Face strength if it does.
• Scratches, tears and stains are not found automatically. The face model also copies marks that lie across a face. Paint over them first, using the scratch brush, so they are filled in before the face is rebuilt.
• Small faces can be missed. Faces smaller than about 20 pixels across can be missed, and even when one is found, a face that small gains little. Crop closer or use a larger scan.
• Only faces are rebuilt. Hands, writing, clothes and background are sharpened and cleaned, not rebuilt. Tiny text can come out as made-up shapes.
• Turned or covered faces, such as a profile, sunglasses or a hat pulled low, give weaker results or are not found.

Tips for a better restoration

• Scan prints at 600 dpi or more, or photograph them flat in even light with no glare. A better starting file always gives a better result.
• Fix a very dark or washed out picture before restoring it, for example with the AI photo enhancer.
• For a heavy blur with no faces, use unblur image. To enlarge only, use the AI image upscaler.
• To lift a person out of the background afterwards, try remove background. To take a stain or a stranger out, use remove objects from a photo, which uses the same scratch model.
• Keep the original scan. Save the restored photo as a new file and note that it was restored, so family history is not confused by a face the AI helped to build.

What the first visit downloads

Each file is checked against its published checksum before it is used, then kept in your browser so it downloads once. Nothing about your photo is sent anywhere.