What the restoration model repairs
Old prints fail in familiar ways, and Qwen Image Edit, the model behind this page, has learned to recognize them: scratches crossing a face, a crease through the sky, foxing stains on a border. It repairs each region to match what the undamaged photo would have shown. Fading and lost contrast come back at the same time, so a washed-out print returns with deep blacks and clean highlights.
A black-and-white photo stays black and white: the tool is deliberately tuned not to colorize. If you want color as a second step, run the restored result through the free AI photo colorizer, which is built exactly for that.
Whole-print restoration vs face restoration
This page repairs the entire print: background, clothing, borders, and faces together. If your photo is not damaged but the faces are soft, blurry, or low-resolution, the free AI face restoration is the sharper tool: it runs a dedicated face model (GFPGAN) that rebuilds facial detail specifically. The two combine well, restore the damage here first, then enhance the faces there.
A complete workflow for old photos
For a family archive scan, the full pipeline looks like this: restore the damage on this page, optionally enhance faces and add color with the linked tools, then enlarge the result with the free AI image upscaler for printing or framing. For heirloom-quality output, Upsampler's premium upscaler reaches 100MP with face enhancement, using one-time credits with no subscription.
What to expect
Restoration is reconstruction: where damage destroyed detail completely, the AI fills in what plausibly belongs there. On ordinary damage, scratches, spots, creases, fading, the result is usually faithful to the original scene. Where a tear removed half a face, inspect the reconstruction critically. The tool accepts JPG, PNG, and WebP up to 4096px per side, and the restored image is re-rendered at about one megapixel; for prints, bring the resolution back up with the upscaler linked above. Scans are processed transiently and discarded once the restoration is delivered.