Restore old, blurry or damaged photos

What actually goes wrong with an old photograph

Age damages a print in several independent ways at once, which is why a single "sharpen" slider never fixes it. There is optical softness, from a lens and a film stock that were never as sharp as a modern sensor. There is physical damage — silvering, foxing, surface scratches, the crease from decades in a wallet. There is scanner noise, which arrives fresh at the moment you digitise. And there is scale: a contact print is small, so even a perfect scan gives you a small file.

Sharpening attacks only the first of those, and it amplifies the other three while it does. Push an unsharp mask over a foxed print and you get a crisper photograph of the foxing.

Step-by-step workflow

1. Digitise it properly. A flatbed scan at your scanner's highest optical resolution beats interpolated resolution and beats a phone photo. If you must photograph the print, use flat, even daylight and shoot straight on — a raking light turns every surface texture into a permanent feature of the file.
2. Run Unblur & Restore. This is the mode built for damage. Restoration strength is tuned for damaged sources and applied automatically, so there is nothing to configure beyond the scale.
3. Choose your scale honestly. 1× cleans up at the original size and is the most faithful option. 2× is for when the scan is genuinely too small for the print size you need.
4. Keep both files. Archive the untouched scan next to the restored version. The scan is the record; the restoration is an interpretation of it.

The honest limit on faces

This matters enough to be blunt about. The model does not recover detail that was lost — it reconstructs detail that is plausible given what survives. On texture, fabric and architecture that distinction rarely matters, because one convincing weave is as good as another.

On a face it matters a great deal. When the eyes in a source print are twelve pixels across, the restored eyes are a well-informed guess. The result usually looks like the person. It is not evidence of what they looked like, and it should not be treated as such for identification, genealogy documentation or anything with legal weight.

Practically: stay at 1× for faces, keep the original scan, and if the restored version will be printed and framed for family, tell them it has been restored. Nobody has ever minded knowing.

Pro tips

• Crop the border off before you run it. Scanner bed, print edge and album residue are all damage as far as the model is concerned, and they consume reconstruction effort that belongs on the photograph.
• Do the worst copy, not the best. If you have both a good print and a damaged one of the same image, restore the damaged one only if it has content the good one lacks. Otherwise scan the good print.
• Colour casts are not damage. A yellowed print is a chemical shift, not lost detail. Correct that in any photo editor afterwards — the restoration pass is not a colour-grading tool.
• Batch by condition, not by album. Prints in similar condition respond similarly, so you learn what to expect after the first two.