Old Photo Restoration
Hand it a damaged old photograph and it mends what the print suffered — scratches, tears, staining, fading — and refuses to invent a single colour nobody alive can confirm. Two fields.
We made two examples, from two different photographs: a monochrome studio portrait, and a colour garden snapshot gone orange. They are the two ends of the colour field: one asks for no colour at all, the other only for what the dyes still hold.
It mends cracks, tears, staining, creases and missing edges without touching the crop or the poses, and the faces stay recognisably the same people. A monochrome print stays grey, with no invented colours. A faded colour print is different: it may be fully colourised with confident tones that were never there, so check any recovered colour against someone's memory before you keep it. Grain also tends to disappear, which can make the photo look too clean and modern.
Generated for this library
Input
Of and damage a woman holding a baby, studio portrait -
a crack across her shoulder, a torn
corner, brown staining, heavy fading
Colour leave it grey
Photograph print-scan.png (1254 x 1254)
Returned 1 image · 1:1 · mended, still grey
mended crack, tear, staining and fade gone; the
torn corner rebuilt from the border it
continues
held crop, pose, expression, the dress, the
studio backdrop, the grain
colour none added - the print's own tones only
faces rebuilt only where the damage crossed them,
and only as far as the other side of the
face vouches for
words none added; nothing written on the print
was alteredYou fill in 2 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1What it is of, and what the damage is
- 2Colour
Old Photo Restoration
What this makes
Hand it a damaged old photograph and it mends what the print suffered — scratches, tears, staining, fading — and refuses to invent a single colour nobody alive can confirm. Two fields.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Attach the scan and paste the template in the same message.
- Replace the two FIELDS lines. Name the damage you can see; anything you do not name is treated as part of the photograph.
- Leave the second field as 'leave it grey' unless someone can tell you a colour from memory. Colour is the part of a restoration that cannot be checked later.
- Compare faces first. If a face came back looking like somebody else, that is the failure this template exists to catch, and no amount of clean background makes up for it.
What you swap
- What it is of, and what the damage is
- a woman holding a baby, studio portrait — a crack across her shoulder, a torn corner, brown staining and heavy fading
- Colour
- leave it grey
Before it runs
- The photograph itself, attached to the message, scanned as well as you can manage. Everything this does is bounded by what survived, so a phone snapshot of a print at an angle takes damage in with it.
- Someone who remembers, if you want colour. The second field is for what a person can actually confirm — her dress was pale blue — and for nothing else. If nobody remembers, the honest answer is to leave it grey, and it is the default for that reason.
- A tolerance for what cannot be recovered. Where a face is gone, this leaves it soft rather than inventing a feature, and that is the right outcome even though it is not the impressive one.
- The damage named. 'Make it look better' has no edge to work at, and a run with no edge improves the whole picture instead — which is how a restoration comes back sharper, warmer and no longer the same photograph.
When to reach for it
When a family print needs to survive being scanned: cracks through a face, a torn corner, mould, a colour snapshot gone orange. Templates in this genre restore beautifully and colourise while they are at it, asserting a hair colour and a dress colour that nobody asked for and nobody can check.
What changes
- One damaged photograph in, one mended photograph out — same crop, same pose, same era.
- Damage is defined as what happened to the print after the shutter, so soft focus, grain and an awkward expression are left alone as part of the picture.
- Colour is off by default: a grey photograph comes back grey unless the field names a colour somebody actually remembers.
- A face with damage across it is rebuilt only as far as the surviving evidence reaches, and left soft where nothing survives.
- No modernising — no smoothed skin, no straightened posture, no opened eyes, nobody added or removed.
Pairs with
- Backlit Silhouette EffectHand it a photograph and it comes back as a cut silhouette lit from behind — no interior anywhere, so every part that has to be recognised must reach the edge and show itself against the light. Two fields.
- Chalkboard Drawing EffectHand it a photograph and it comes back drawn in chalk on a black board — where the darkest thing in the picture is bare board, because chalk adds light and there is no way to draw a dark line. Two fields.
- Contour Line DrawingHand it a photograph and it comes back as contour lines — every line a closed loop at one depth, none of them crossing, none of them stopping in mid-air, with the spacing doing all the shading. Two fields.