Grainy old photos, smooth again.

Grain and noise look similar on screen and come from opposite places. Film grain is physical. The image on a negative is made of clumps of silver crystals, and faster films use larger crystals, which is why a photograph shot indoors in 1978 on high-speed film is visibly coarser than one shot outdoors on slow film the same afternoon. That texture was in the photograph on the day it was made; it is a property of the original, not a defect that crept in later. Digital noise is the opposite — an electrical artefact produced by a sensor straining in poor light, showing up as fine speckle and coloured blotches in the shadows, representing nothing that was ever in front of the lens. Your scanner can add its own version of the second kind. Deciding which you are looking at is the whole of the diagnosis, and it takes one look at the shadows at 100 per cent.

Restoration does something specific to grain, and only in one place. RestoreFormer++ does not filter or smooth your photograph; it rebuilds each face it finds and blends that reconstruction back into the frame. Note too that a photograph with no face in it for the model to find never runs at all — the tool says so and spends nothing. The practical effect is that grain inside a face is replaced by reconstructed skin, lashes and hair, while grain everywhere else — the coat, the wall, the sky — comes back exactly as it went in. On a moderately grainy print that is precisely what you want, since the face is the part you were straining to see. On a very grainy one it can produce a visible mismatch: a clean, detailed face sitting in a speckled scene. Look at the result at full size before you decide you like it, and if the mismatch bothers you, a light global denoise applied afterwards in your own editor evens it out better than anything applied before the run would have.

Several scanning decisions make grain worse, and one of them is counter-intuitive. Scanning at a very high resolution can make a print look coarser rather than finer, because past a certain point the scanner stops averaging crystals into pixels and starts resolving the crystals themselves, sometimes with a mottled interference pattern on top. If 1200 DPI looks worse than 600, believe the 600. Scanner sharpening amplifies grain enthusiastically and should be off — the scanning workflow page lists the rest of the settings worth disabling. And do not confuse either of these with compression blocking, which is square, regular and concentrated around edges; telling the two blurs apart covers how to spot it. Real physical damage sitting in the grain — spots, tide marks — is a job for the brush on the stain remover.

Remove less than you think, and know where the file goes while you decide. A photograph scrubbed clean of grain often reads as synthetic, with skin like moulded plastic and fine textures gone; grain is part of how a print from 1963 announces that it is a print from 1963. Do any denoising gently, last, at final output size, and always with the original open beside it. The one step that leaves your machine is this one: restoration is Cloud HD, our Pro-only, opt-in server-side feature set, running on a GPU because the model is too heavy for a browser. Your photograph is encrypted in transit, 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 on Cloudflare R2 storage and a Modal GPU, and never used to train anything. The restoration hub covers the identity check on every rebuilt face, and the on-device upscaler handles any enlargement afterwards without uploading anything.