Practical guides to old photographs and what can actually be done about them.
Tears, water damage, fading and silvering each need a different fix. Which ones software handles, which need a human, and which are already too far gone.
Restoring photographs is a sequence, not a button. Judge the print, make one honest copy, repair in the right order, and know which damage needs a human.
Colourisation does not recover the colours that were there. It proposes plausible ones. Here is what it reliably gets right and what it is inventing.
Guides restore one print at a time. A boxful is a different job: what to copy first, what order to work in, and which photos are not worth restoring.
Adding pixels is instant and adds nothing. What an upscaler adds is a plausible guess, and where that guess is safe is the whole question.
Motion, missed focus and too few pixels look identical on a phone screen and are three different problems. Only some of them can be undone.
Soft, small, blocky and speckled are four separate faults that get one word. Which one you have decides the fix, and the wrong fix makes it worse.
A studio rebuilds what is missing by hand and a model proposes what is plausible. Which of the two your photograph needs depends on how it was damaged.
Enhancer covers four unrelated jobs, and an app that is excellent at one is often blind to another. Sort your photo first, then pick for that job.
The resolution question has a real answer, and it is smaller than the internet suggests. What matters far more is the pass you only get to do once.
Pixelated and simply too small are two different faults with two different answers, and most of the tools promising both are quietly answering the easier one.
The Photoshop route in the order it actually works, because the order is where the result comes from. Noise first, resample last, sharpen at output size.
Typing 300 into the resolution box changes a label and leaves every pixel exactly as it was. Here is the sum that actually decides whether a print will be sharp.
Where the field lives on a Mac, on Windows and in an editor, and the case every other guide skips: the file is allowed to carry no density at all.