Remove Scratches from a Scanned Photo — Pro, on our server
Two different models, two different kinds of damage, and it matters which you reach for. A faded face is missing detail everywhere across a region the model has learned the general shape of, which is why face restoration can rebuild it convincingly and check the result against the person in your original. A scratch is the opposite: nothing is faded, a narrow strip is simply gone, and everything needed to replace it sits a few pixels to either side. That is a painting problem with a mask, and it is what this page runs. The restorer will not touch a scratch, on purpose — a tool that quietly invented emulsion would stop being a record of your print.
Scan once, well, and work on the scan. 600 DPI for a small print, 300 for anything above postcard size, glass clean, print flat, lid closed to kill reflections. Crop the scanner bed off with the free on-device crop tool before you upload anything, and keep the raw scan as an untouched master that every later version descends from. A photograph of a print taken with a phone also works — square on, in soft daylight, no flash, no glare across the gloss — but a flatbed shows the scratch as a cleaner line, and a cleaner line makes a narrower mask, and a narrower mask reconstructs better. The 25 MB and 24 megapixel ceilings are generous enough for a 600 DPI scan of an ordinary family print.
Mask the shoulder, not only the line. Under a scanner a scratch reads as a bright core with a softer dark margin either side where the emulsion lifted, and it is the margin that betrays a lazy mask: fill only the core and a pale ghost of the whole scratch remains, running exactly where the damage was. Brush a band two or three times the visible width, follow the line all the way to the picture edge, and put every scratch, crease, silverfish trail and pen mark into the same mask, because one mask is one run whatever it contains. The exception worth making by hand is a scratch crossing an eye or a mouth: leave that short section unpainted and let the face model deal with it, since an invented eye is the one artefact nobody forgives.
Order of operations, and what happens to the file. Clean the damage first, restore the faces second, add colour third if the print is black and white, and enlarge last on your own device. Each step hands the next a simpler picture, and only the first three involve an upload at all. Stains and foxing are a related but separate mask, covered on stain removal; broad softness and noise across a whole scan is not a mask job at all and belongs to the photo enhancer; a pen mark, a drawing pin or a strip of tape across the print is ordinary work for the object remover. This tool is Cloud HD — Pro-only, opt-in, on our GPU in the United States, with the scan and mask encrypted in transit, deleted when the run finishes and in all cases within 24 hours, and never used to train anything. Pro includes 150 runs a month on Monthly, 200 on Annual, of which 10 may be HD.