Black and white, restored sharp.

A monochrome photograph is not a colour photograph with the colour taken away. It was made that way, and everything it has to say is said in tone: the separation between a dark coat and a darker doorway, the gradation across a cheek, the point where a highlight goes to paper white and stops carrying information altogether. That is why age hurts a black-and-white print in a particular way. As it fades, the mid-tones compress towards each other, and the structure that made a face readable — the small differences between the shadow under a brow and the shadow beside a nose — flattens into a single grey. Nothing is missing, exactly. It has simply all become the same value.

Face restoration does not need colour, because it is rebuilding structure. RestoreFormer++ works from the geometry of a face: where the eyes sit, how the lids cut across them, where hair meets forehead. All of that is present in a monochrome image, so a well-scanned black-and-white portrait restores every bit as well as a colour one — often better, because monochrome prints of that era were frequently made from larger negatives. The result comes back as a PNG at exactly the resolution you uploaded, in the same monochrome tonality it went in with, faces rebuilt and each one compared against your original before anything is returned. A print the model cannot locate a face in is declined rather than processed, and a declined attempt is not charged. The restoration hub explains that identity check, and restoring faces in old photos covers what happens when the frame holds several people.

Read the tone before you correct it, because some of it is not damage. A warm sepia cast is very often deliberate: toning a print converted its silver into a more stable compound, and that chemistry is part of the reason the photograph survived long enough for you to hold it. Correcting it to neutral grey is a choice about presentation, not a repair. The blue metallic sheen you sometimes see across the darkest areas is silver mirroring, a physical change in the print surface that no restoration model touches; angle and diffuse lighting when you copy the print are what reduce it. And scan in colour rather than greyscale — the detail on the scanning page explains why. Real physical damage, the tears and stains, belongs with the scratch remover and its brush, not with this model.

Colour stays an explicit decision, and the upload stays short-lived. If you want a colourised interpretation as well, the combined restore and colorize run does both in one pass and counts as an HD run, and the standalone colorizer handles a photograph that is already sharp enough. Whichever you use, the colour is plausible rather than verified — nobody knows what that dress actually was. As for the file: restoration is Cloud HD, our Pro-only, opt-in server-side feature set. Your scan 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 crop tool and every other MiniPx tool run entirely on your own device.