Restoring a photograph, in the order the work actually happens
The results for this question are almost all tools. Upload here, click once, done. Sometimes that genuinely is the whole job. Often it produces a clean picture of the wrong thing, because the decision that mattered was made before any software was opened.
Restoration is a sequence. Judge the object, make a faithful copy of it, repair the copy. Doing those in the wrong order is how people lose the only version they had.
Start with the print, not the file
The physical print is the original, and every copy is downstream of it. Before anything else, look at what state it is in and whether handling it is safe.
Prints stuck to glass, stuck to each other, or still damp are handling problems first. Pulling them apart takes the emulsion with them, and once the emulsion has gone there is nothing left for any software to read. If a print is stuck, copy it as it is and leave the separating to a conservator.
Make one honest copy before improving anything
That copy is the master. Everything after this happens to a duplicate of it, so a restoration that goes wrong sends you back to a file rather than back to the shoebox.
Capture it flat and evenly lit, at the largest size your scanner or phone genuinely resolves rather than the largest it will claim. Turn off sharpening, colour correction and dust removal on the way in. Those are decisions, and decisions belong in the editing step where you can undo them.
- Capture the whole print including its border. Cropping later is reversible, uncropping is not.
- For a glossy or silvered print, shoot it at a slight angle in soft indirect light rather than flat under a lamp.
- Keep the file even if it looks worse than you hoped. It is the record of what the print actually was.
Repair structure first, blemishes last
Work from the largest, most structural damage down to the smallest. Tears and missing areas first, overall colour second, speckles and dust last.
The other order wastes an hour cleaning dust off a region you were about to reconstruct anyway.
- Structure: tears, creases, missing corners, anywhere the information is absent rather than degraded.
- Tone: fading, colour casts, flat contrast. These run across the whole print and are easiest to judge once the structure is whole again.
- Blemishes: dust, speckling, fine scratches. Tedious, and the only stage where more time reliably buys more quality.
Deciding what is worth paying a person for
Automated repair rebuilds a missing area from what surrounds it. That works because most of a photograph is predictable: fabric, wall, sky, grass. It stops working where the missing part is the one nobody can infer, which is almost always a face.
A rebuilt face usually looks convincing, and that is the danger. It is a plausible face rather than the face, and it is the part of the picture anyone looking at it cares about. This is where a human retoucher who can work from another photograph of the same person earns the fee.
Everything else, a tear through a jacket, a stained corner, a magenta cast across the whole frame, is work software does quickly and does well.
More guides
Questions
What is the first thing to do with a damaged photograph?
Check whether it is safe to handle. Prints that are damp, or stuck to glass or to each other, need separating by somebody who does that for a living. Everything else starts with making a copy before you touch anything.
Can restoration recover detail that is no longer on the print?
No. It infers detail from the surrounding area. That is reliable across predictable surfaces and unreliable across a face, where the result will look convincing without being right.
Is a phone photo good enough, or do I need a scanner?
A phone in even, indirect light is enough for most prints. A scanner earns its place on small prints where you want every bit of detail, and loses to a phone on silvered or heavily glossed prints where reflections are the real problem.