How to restore an old photo

01Scan it properly first

Everything downstream depends on the scan. A phone photograph taken at an angle, under a ceiling lamp, with your own shadow across one corner hands the restorer three new problems on top of the ones already in the paper: perspective distortion, uneven lighting, and a bright specular patch where the emulsion caught the light.

Lay the print flat, light it evenly from both sides, and shoot straight down — or use a flatbed scanner at 600 dpi if you have one. Pixelyft accepts JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC up to 10 MB, so a scan straight from an iPhone works without converting anything first.

02Damage that restoration handles well

Restoration models work best on damage with a clear boundary between what was destroyed and what survived, because the surrounding pixels are what tell the model that belongs there. In practice that means:

• Surface scratches, scuffs and emulsion cracks running across the print
• Fold lines and creases, including the white channel where the paper fibre broke
• Tears and missing corners, as long as the missing area is small next to the subject
• Water staining, foxing and the brown mottling that comes from damp storage
• Overall fading and colour shift, including the magenta cast older colour prints drift toward

03Where it stops, and why that is the honest answer

A restorer reconstructs from context. Where there is no context there is nothing to reconstruct from, and that is the real limit. If half a face is missing, no model knows what that person looked like. It will produce a plausible face, which is exactly the problem: plausible is not the same as correct, and on a photograph of a relative the difference is the whole point.

Pixelyft's Restore is built to preserve rather than invent. Faces, clothing layers, accessories, background objects and period-appropriate tone are held in place while the damage is cleaned away. When a region is genuinely unrecoverable, a human retoucher making deliberate choices is the right tool, and it is worth paying for on the two or three photographs that deserve it.

04Colour, and when to leave it alone

Colourising a black-and-white photograph is a guess about the world, not a recovery of something latent in the negative. The uniform might have been green. The dress might have been blue. A careful colouriser makes historically plausible choices; it does not know, and it cannot.

Pixelyft separates the two deliberately. Classic Restore cleans the damage and revives the original tones, leaving black-and-white as black-and-white and sepia as sepia. Color Restore does the same repair and then adds restrained, period-plausible colour. If the photograph is a document, use Classic. If it is going on the wall, try both and decide with your eyes.

05What it costs and what happens to your file

Every new account gets one free restore in the Classic style, so you can test the result on your most difficult photograph before deciding anything. Beyond that, Pro is €19.99 a month with a monthly credit allowance that rolls over, and there are one-time image packs — 150 images for €4.99 or 300 for €9.99, used within 15 days — which buy processing outright with no subscription and no card kept on file.

Uploads travel over an encrypted connection, and results are saved to your account so you can download them again later. They stay private to your account, are never made public, and are never used to train models. Storage can be switched off for your account in Settings at any time.