Restore Old Photos Free
Clean up scanned prints in a few clicks: dust and specks, film grain, faded or yellowed colour, flat contrast and crooked scans. Every step is free, previews live, and only applies when you press Restore.
What it fixes
- Crop & straighten - finds the print on the scanner bed, levels it and cuts the bed away. Photos with no scanner border are left alone.
- Remove dust - fills small specks and hairs on smooth areas such as sky and skin.
- Reduce grain - smooths film grain and scanner noise.
- Fix faded colours - brings each colour of a faded or yellowed print back to its full range.
- Improve contrast - recovers detail in flat, muddy areas without shifting colours.
- Sharpen - restores crispness, applied last so grain is not sharpened with it.
- Red-eye - click each red pupil and it turns dark and natural.
How it works
Tick the fixes you want and set how strong each one is. The photo updates as a preview, so you can compare before and after. Nothing is changed until you press Restore; Reset drops the preview, and Undo takes back a restore you have applied.
Each fix runs once per press, so applying a second fix never doubles up the first. A fix at 0% leaves the photo exactly as it was.
Getting the best scan
- Scan at 600 DPI or more for small prints; the extra pixels give every fix more to work with.
- Wipe the scanner glass and the print first. Software removes specks well, but large hairs and smudges are easier to stop than to fix.
- Save the scan as PNG or a high-quality JPEG. Heavy compression adds blocky artefacts that look like damage.
What it cannot do
These are careful image-processing steps, not AI that invents detail. They will not rebuild a torn-off corner, a missing face or deep creases across important detail, and they will not colourise a black-and-white photo.
For a large tear, try the object remover on the damaged area after restoring.
A whole album at once
Use Batch to run the same restore on up to 20 scans and download them together as a ZIP.