Photo restoration, for old prints.

Restoration was a craft long before it was a button. A retoucher works from a scan at high magnification, rebuilding an eyelid stroke by stroke, cloning intact texture across a crease, matching grain so the repair does not read as a smooth patch, and making a hundred small judgements about how much intervention the photograph can take before it stops being the photograph. That is why the work is priced in hours. The automated version does not replace that craft; it takes one part of it — the reconstruction of a face that has gone soft — and does that part in seconds, on demand, for as many photographs as you care to feed it.

Here is precisely what the automated part is. RestoreFormer++ finds each face in the photograph, rebuilds it at high resolution from what it has learned about the structure of human faces, and blends it back into your frame at the same output size. Every rebuilt face is then compared against the same face in your upload by a face-recognition model, and a restoration that has drifted from the person is refused rather than returned — a refused run costs nothing. Outside the faces, nothing is altered. A photograph with no findable face is declined instead of being processed into something barely different, and physical damage comes back exactly as it went in. The restoration hub sets out the mechanics; the quality triage page sorts out which of your problems this actually addresses.

A human still wins on everything that requires a view. If half a face is gone and the only evidence for what it looked like is a sibling’s portrait from the same decade, that is inference a model cannot responsibly make and a person can. If damage runs across lace, foliage or a patterned wall, our object remover will help most on small-to-medium areas with predictable surroundings — sky, a plain wall, grass, fabric — and struggle exactly where a retoucher earns their fee. And if the photograph is going into an exhibition, a book or a legal file, you want somebody accountable for each decision. Use the automated pass for the hundreds of photographs in the box, and a person for the three that matter most.

Keep the archival habits, whichever route you take. Never let a restored file overwrite the scan it came from; store derivatives beside the master with names that say what was done to them. Do the enlargement last, on your own device with the upscaler, and add colour as a deliberate separate step through the colorizer if you want it. As for the upload itself: restoration is Cloud HD, the Pro-only, opt-in feature set that runs on our GPU because the model is far 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. Every other tool on this site runs on your own device.