Restore Faded Photos — Free, Fast & Private
The order of operations matters more than any single tool. Restore, then colorize, then upscale. Restoration wants the scan as close to the original as possible — every earlier processing pass smears the detail it reads faces from. The colorizer then gets restored faces to paint, which reads far more naturally than colour laid over blur. And the upscaler goes last because it faithfully preserves whatever it is given — including any flaw you have not fixed yet. Only the first two steps involve an upload; the rest happens on your own device.
Fading is chemistry, and the faces bear the worst of it. Silver prints fade towards flat grey, colour prints towards orange or magenta, and in both cases the mid-tones that carry a face’s structure go first. That is why a face-restoration model is the right first move for a faded print: it rebuilds exactly the range the decades took. What it will not do is repaint the whole scene — the tool declines photos with no findable face, and physical damage outside the faces comes back untouched, on purpose.
Scan once, properly, and archive the scan. 600 DPI for small prints, 300 DPI for larger ones, into an untouched master file you never edit. Every restored, colorized or enlarged version is a derivative that lives beside it, named so the difference is obvious in twenty years. If the print matters, keep the print too — paper has outlasted every file format so far.
These are family faces, so privacy is stated plainly. This tool runs on our GPU server because the model is too heavy for a browser. The scan is encrypted in transit, processed once, deleted on completion and in all cases within 24 hours, and never used to train anything — ours or anyone else’s.