AI Photo Restoration: Bring Old Family Photos Back to Life
Open-source AI photo restoration: GFPGAN for faces, Real-ESRGAN for detail, and a workflow for scratches, tears and faded color.
📜 Table of Contents
Old photos are time capsules with scratches on the glass. AI restoration removes the scratches - the pipeline is free, local, and surprisingly good.
The Pipeline
Step 1: scan at high resolution - 600 DPI minimum, the AI can only restore what it sees. Step 2: GFPGAN (37,654 stars) restores faces first; it was built for this. Step 3: Real-ESRGAN (36,414 stars) upscales and sharpens the whole image. Step 4: light manual cleanup in any editor for tears and dust. InsightFace (29,437 stars) handles alignment for badly angled faces.
Realistic Expectations
Heavily damaged photos improve dramatically but gain synthetic texture - faces become smoother than the original. For archival, keep the raw scan and treat the AI version as a display copy. Colorize separately if wanted: models that colorize grayscale work best after restoration, not before.
FAQ
Q: Can it fix blurry faces?
A: GFPGAN does a remarkable job on slightly blurry faces; severely blurred ones become plausible but not identical.
Q: How long does one photo take?
A: 10-60 seconds on CPU per photo, 2-5 seconds on GPU.
Written by our editorial team; tools listed here are tested or verified against public sources. Links point to official sites or GitHub repos for reference only — no paid placements.