Restore Vintage Photos — Pro, on our server
“Vintage” is not one condition; it is a century of different chemistries ageing in different directions. A tintype or ambrotype from the 1860s is an image on metal or glass, usually dark, usually low in contrast, and often sitting behind a varnish that has crazed. A cabinet card of the 1890s is an albumen print on card stock that yellows and loses its highlights first, which is why great-grandfather seems to be dissolving from the forehead down. Silver gelatin prints of the mid-twentieth century are the most durable of the lot, though the edges often carry the blue-silver sheen of mirroring. Colour is where the real losses are: the dye layers in a 1970s print do not fade at the same rate, which is why a seventies photograph reliably drifts orange or magenta while a Kodachrome slide from the same decade still looks startlingly correct. Instant prints are a category of their own — small, soft on the day they were made, and prone to chemical blotching.
The model reads none of that history, and only touches the faces. RestoreFormer++ locates each face, rebuilds it at high resolution and blends it back into your frame, whatever era the surrounding photograph came from. So the useful question is not “can it restore a cabinet card” but “is there enough of a face left in my copy of the cabinet card”. Three things are firmly outside its remit and stay that way: the overall colour cast of a faded colour print, which is a levels adjustment rather than a restoration; physical damage such as crazed varnish, emulsion loss, foxing and torn corners, which needs the brush on the scratch remover; and anything in a photograph with no findable face, which is declined rather than processed.
Getting the object into a file is genuinely half the work. Paper prints go on a flatbed at 600 DPI, face down, with the lid closed. A tintype is a mirror, so a flatbed usually gives you a picture of the scanner: photograph it instead, in soft indirect daylight, camera slightly off-axis, with nothing bright behind you. Glass plate negatives want light coming through them from behind and then an inversion. Slides and film belong in a scanner with a transparency unit. Whatever the source, crop the mount, the bevel or the scanner bed away with the on-device crop tool so the faces occupy more of the frame, and correct any global cast before you upload. For a black-and-white original, restoring first and adding colour second is the order that works — see restoring black and white photos and the colorizer itself.
An heirloom deserves an explicit account of where its digital copy goes. Restoration is part of Cloud HD, the Pro-only, opt-in feature set that runs on our GPU because the model will not fit in a browser. Your file is encrypted in transit, uploaded to our server for that run and deleted when the run finishes, and in all cases within 24 hours. Processing happens in the United States, on Cloudflare R2 storage and a Modal GPU, and nothing you upload is ever used to train anything. The model that ran is named on your job, and it can change — you can always see which one processed it. The main restoration page covers the identity check; everything else on MiniPx runs on your own device.