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No. 05 — AI Tools · Cloud HDPro · on our GPU

Scanned photos, cleaned up.

The scan you make once is the record everything else is derived from. Get the resolution right, switch the scanner’s helpfulness off, keep the master untouched — and then let our server rebuild the faces in a copy of it.

Pro · Cloud HDDeleted on completionUp to 25 MB · 24 MP
Restore a scanned photoCloud HD · our GPU

Pro to restore your photo →

How it works

  1. Pick your scan — JPEG, PNG or WebP, up to 25 MB and 24 megapixels. Make a smaller copy first if the master is over either limit.
  2. Our GPU restores the faces and checks each one against your original. If the result drifts too far from the person in your photo, the run is refused rather than handing back an invented face — and you are not charged.
  3. Download the restored PNG at the same resolution you uploaded, and file it beside the master scan.

This page is the photo restorer, tuned to what happens on the flatbed before the upload.

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Restore Scanned Photos — Pro, on our server

Resolution is the one decision you cannot revisit later. Everything else in a restoration project can be redone from the master file; the master file itself can only be redone by finding the print again and putting it back on the glass. So scan generously, and do the arithmetic before you start rather than after. Dots per inch multiplied by the print’s dimensions gives you pixels: a 6 by 4 inch print at 600 DPI is 3600 by 2400, which is 8.6 megapixels; a 5 by 7 at the same setting is 12.6 megapixels; an 8 by 10 is 28.8 megapixels, which is past the 24 megapixel ceiling this tool accepts. At 600 DPI that ceiling arrives at roughly 67 square inches of print — about 8 inches square. Above that size, 300 to 400 DPI is the right answer, and it is still far more detail than a soft old print actually holds. One further intake rule is worth knowing before you batch a stack: a scan in which no face can be found is turned back rather than run, at no cost.

Then turn the scanner’s cleverness off. Consumer scanning software arrives with colour restoration, backlight correction, auto contrast, descreening, dust removal and sharpening all willing to help, and each of them writes an irreversible decision into your master. Sharpening is the worst offender for this workflow, because the halos it leaves look like detail to a restoration model that has no way of knowing they were added by software forty seconds ago. Dust removal deserves its own footnote: the infrared method most scanners use reads the physical texture of film and does not behave correctly on traditional silver black-and-white prints or on Kodachrome. Descreening is the one setting worth leaving on, and only for photographs cut out of newspapers and books, where the original is a grid of printed dots. Scan monochrome prints in colour mode as well — a sepia or warm-toned print is not neutral, and greyscale simply discards that.

Keep the master, upload a copy. Archive the untouched scan as a TIFF or PNG and never edit it. If it is over 25 MB or 24 megapixels — and a good scan of a large print easily is — make a separate upload copy on your own machine with the image converter or the compressor, and trim the scanner-bed border away with the crop tool so the faces take up more of the frame. All three of those run entirely in your browser. Then restore, and keep the restored PNG as a derivative beside the master rather than on top of it — the family archive page covers naming and filing a large batch.

One step in that chain leaves your machine, and it is clearly marked. Face restoration is Cloud HD, the Pro-only, opt-in feature set that runs on our GPU because RestoreFormer++ is far too heavy for a browser. The copy you upload is encrypted in transit, held on our server for that run and deleted when the run finishes, and in all cases within 24 hours; processing is in the United States on Cloudflare R2 storage and a Modal GPU, and nothing is ever used to train anything. If your scan is soft everywhere rather than only in the faces, the sharpening page explains why a slider will not fix it, and the restoration hub covers the identity check applied to every face.

How it works

  1. Clean the glass and the print: A soft brush over the print and a lint-free wipe on the platen removes dust that would otherwise be scanned at 600 DPI in perfect focus.
  2. Scan flat, at the right DPI, with corrections off: 600 DPI up to postcard size, 300 to 400 DPI above that, colour mode even for monochrome prints, and every auto-enhance option disabled.
  3. Keep a master and make an upload copy: Archive the untouched scan. If it exceeds 25 MB or 24 megapixels, produce a smaller copy on your own device and upload that.
  4. Restore the faces: Upload the copy here. Each face is rebuilt by RestoreFormer++ and identity-checked against your scan before anything is returned.

Frequently asked questions

What resolution should I scan a print at?
600 DPI is the sensible default for anything up to about postcard size, and 300 to 400 DPI for larger prints. The reason is arithmetic rather than taste: a 6 by 4 inch print at 600 DPI is 3600 by 2400 pixels, or 8.6 megapixels, comfortably inside the ceiling. An 8 by 10 at the same setting is 28.8 megapixels, which is over it.
My scan is too large to upload. What do I do with it?
The limits are 25 MB and 24 megapixels. At 600 DPI you reach 24 megapixels at around 67 square inches of print, roughly 8 by 8 inches. Either rescan the larger print at 400 DPI, or keep the big master and make a smaller upload copy: convert the TIFF to a high-quality JPEG with the on-device converter, which never uploads anything.
Should I use the scanner software’s own restore, dust removal and sharpening settings?
Switch them off for the master scan. Auto-contrast, colour restoration and built-in sharpening bake irreversible decisions into the file, and the sharpening in particular hands the restoration model halos it will treat as detail. Infrared dust removal is also worth knowing about: it does not work correctly on traditional silver black-and-white prints or on Kodachrome.
Should a black-and-white print be scanned in colour or greyscale?
Scan it in colour. A monochrome print is rarely neutral grey — it carries sepia, a warm silver tone or the yellowing of its paper — and a colour scan records that. Greyscale throws it away for no gain in quality, and if you later want to add colour, the colorizer has more to read in an RGB file.
Why does my scan of a newspaper photograph look like a mesh of dots?
Because it is one. Printed photographs are halftones — grids of dots — and scanning a grid at a different grid spacing produces moiré patterns. Turn on your scanner software’s descreen setting for printed originals, or scan at a much higher resolution and reduce afterwards. The face model has no idea those dots are an artefact of printing.
How long do you keep a scan?
It is uploaded to our server for that run and deleted when the run finishes, and in all cases within 24 hours. Nothing is kept afterwards, nothing is used to train anything, and the transfer is encrypted. Processing happens in the United States on Cloudflare R2 storage and a Modal GPU. This is Cloud HD; the converter and cropper mentioned above never upload at all.