Photo restoration guides
Practical, honest advice on saving family photos — written by people who restore them every day.
How to Restore Old Family Photos with AI (Step-by-Step Guide)
A complete guide to restoring faded, scratched and damaged family photos using AI — what it genuinely fixes, the over-restoration mistake almost every tool makes, how to choose between subtle and aggressive modes, and how to keep the result looking like your relatives instead of strangers.
How to Fix Water-Damaged Photos (Before They’re Lost Forever)
Water damage is time-sensitive: wet photos can fuse permanently within days and mold starts in 48-72 hours. What to do in the first 48 hours, what never to do, how to save stuck-together prints, and how AI repair handles tide lines, bleeding and mold.
AI Photo Restoration vs. a Professional Retoucher: Honest Comparison
When is AI restoration enough, and when should you pay a human? Cost, quality and turnaround compared honestly — including the cases where AI invents details that were never there, and how to tell a faithful repair from a repaint.
How to Digitize Old Photos: Scanning Settings That Actually Matter
The scanning settings that determine whether your digital copies are archival quality or throwaway — DPI, file format, color depth, and the three mistakes that ruin a family photo archive before it starts.
How to Fix Yellowed and Faded Photos (And Why They Changed Color)
Yellowing and fading have different causes and need different fixes. What is chemically happening to your old prints, why you cannot safely bleach them, and how to restore the color digitally without making people look gray.
How to Preserve Old Family Photos So They Stop Fading
The four things destroying your old photographs, the storage materials that are actually archival (and the ones marketed as safe that are not), and how to prioritize a shoebox you cannot fix all at once.
Do AI Photo Restorers Change Faces? We Tested 3 Tools Pixel-by-Pixel
We measured whether AI photo restoration changes skin tone, invents color in black-and-white photos, or repaints faces — including two failures we found in our own pipeline. Real numbers, real methodology, and how to run the same checks yourself.