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No. 07 — AI Tools · Cloud HDPro · on our GPU

Scanned photo, dust and softness gone.

Half of what looks wrong with a scan was decided at the glass: the resolution you chose, the dust nobody blew off, the print that was not quite flat. Fix those and a single Cloud HD pass takes the rest — scanner softness, faded tone, and the faces.

Pro · Cloud HDDeleted on completionUp to 25 MB · 24 MP
Enhance a scanCloud HD · our GPU

Pro to enhance your photo →

How it works

  1. Pick the scan, straightened and cropped — JPEG, PNG or WebP up to 25 MB and 24 megapixels.
  2. It is uploaded to our server for that run and deleted when the run finishes, and in all cases within 24 hours.
  3. Download it at the same size, sharper with faces restored and tone lifted. One general Cloud HD run.

This page is the AI photo enhancer, tuned to what happens between the print and the file.

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Enhance a Scanned Photo — Pro, on our server

A scanner has its own softness, and it is not the print’s fault. The sensor bar reads through a lens and a strip of glass, the carriage moves on a belt, and the print may be sitting a fraction of a millimetre above the platen because it curled. All three cost fine detail, which is why a scan often looks less crisp than the print does in your hand. That kind of uniform, mild softness is close to the ideal input for the Cloud HD enhancer: the structure is present and merely low in contrast, so reconstruction has something real to anchor to. Weighting the print flat with a book is the free half of the fix.

Resolution is a decision, not a maximum. The number that matters is your scanner’s optical resolution — what the sensor genuinely measures — and everything above it is interpolation dressed up as detail. Six hundred DPI captures what a normal photographic print holds; going to 2400 on the same print mostly produces a very large file of the same information, and can push you past the 24-megapixel Cloud HD input limit for nothing. Negatives and slides are the exception, because there the original is tiny and dense with detail.

Some scan faults belong to other tools entirely. Dust and hair need a blower and a rescan. A printed reproduction brings a halftone screen that no enhancement cleanly descreens — the grain page covers why that pattern is a different animal from film grain in a scan. A skewed scan wants the free rotate tool and then the crop tool, both on your own device. And if the print is a portrait whose faces have gone milky with age, the photo restorer is built around exactly that and refuses a face it cannot rebuild faithfully.

Archive the master, share the derivative, and know where the derivative was made. Keep the untouched scan at full size as the file you never edit; every enhanced, colourised or enlarged version lives beside it with a name that says what it is. When you do run an enhancement, remember that Cloud HD is the one part of MiniPx that leaves your machine: it is Pro-only and opt-in, the file is uploaded to our server for that run and deleted when the run finishes, and in all cases within 24 hours, processed in the United States, encrypted in transit, and never used to train anything; RestoreFormer++ is the model in service now, and each result names it. If the destination is paper, the page on enhancing a photo for printing covers the sizing arithmetic that comes next.

How it works

  1. Clean the glass and the print: A blower or a soft brush on both. Dust removed here never has to be dealt with later, and no model removes it convincingly.
  2. Scan at optical resolution, in colour: 600 DPI is a good default for a print. Colour mode even for monochrome, so the paper tone is recorded.
  3. Straighten and crop on your device: Rotate to square and trim the scanner bed away with the on-device tools. Neither step uploads anything.
  4. Run one Cloud HD pass: Up to 25 MB and 24 megapixels. Scanner softness is cleaned up, faces are restored, faded colour is lifted, at the same size.

Frequently asked questions

What resolution should I scan a print at?
For an ordinary print, 600 DPI is the sensible default: enough to resolve everything the paper holds without producing a file so large it hits the 24-megapixel limit. Small prints and negatives justify more, big prints need less. A 6 by 4 inch print at 600 DPI is about 8.6 megapixels, which sits comfortably inside the Cloud HD input limits.
My scanner claims 9600 DPI. Should I use it?
Almost certainly not. That figure is usually interpolated — the software inventing pixels between the ones the sensor actually measured — and the optical resolution is far lower. Interpolated pixels add file size and no information, and they make the scan slower and softer-looking. Find the optical figure in the specifications and stay at or below it.
Will it remove dust specks and hairs from the scan?
No. Dust is a physical object on the glass, not softness, and the enhancer returns it faithfully. Clean the platen and the print with a blower or a soft brush and rescan — that is a thirty-second fix. For a spot too stubborn to rescan away, the object remover paints over small regions with predictable surroundings, and it draws the HD sub-quota.
Should I scan a black-and-white print in colour mode?
Yes, usually. A colour scan captures the paper tone — the warm cream of an old fibre print or a sepia shift — which is genuine information about the object. Convert to grey later if you want to, on your own device, and keep the colour scan as the master. The fade-correction pass also has more to work with when the tone is present.
Is a phone photograph of a print good enough?
It can be. Shoot square-on in soft indirect daylight, keep the print flat, avoid the glare that a glossy surface throws back, and fill the frame. What you lose against a flatbed is even lighting and geometric accuracy; what you gain is that it takes ten seconds. Straighten and crop afterwards on your device before uploading.