Restore a Faded Photo Without Painting Over the Paper

Separate the paper from the picture

A color print from the 1970s often goes magenta in the shadows and yellow in the borders. That is dye failure. A black-and-white print that has gone brown is often the paper and the fixer, not a missing palette. Colorize on a yellowed color print paints the stain. Correct the cast in the scan software, or decide the cast is the object, before you spend two credits on a hue.

This tool does not publish curves, a white balance slider, or a fade amount. The modes are denoise, unblur, upscale, face restore, and colorize. If the only problem is a gentle cast and you still have a scanner, fix it there and do not upload. If the cast is the photograph you want to keep, leave it and do not ask a model to ‘restore’ it into a modern print.

Dust sits on top of the fade and becomes part of the color if you paint first. Denoise the speckle, look at a border and a face, and only then consider colorize for a file that is actually black and white. A hand-tinted portrait already has color in the cheeks. Denoising that tint off is damage. The old-photo page and the scanned-photo page are the companions when the defect is a scratch or a dirty glass, not a lost dye.

What still has to be true after the color

Colorize costs two credits and is on the free tool, so one colorize fits in a guest day of three credits and a second does not. The dyes are a guess. A dress that might have been blue or gray will be one of those, confidently. Keep the monochrome download beside the color one. The scan is the record. The color file is a derivative you can reject.

Production calls the Replicate model named by REPLICATE_MODEL_COLORIZE, defaulting to piddnad/ddcolor. With the mock provider the tool draws a split-tone placeholder and says so. Do not deliver the placeholder as a neural colorization. A token is what switches the job to the hosted model. Either way the slider stays, because a plausible palette is not a memory.

Faces in faded prints are the case for restraint. Face restore can sand off the grain of a 1950s snapshot and put a contemporary mouth on a person who did not have one. If the eyes get rounder, stop. Unblur or a modest 2× is the guest test. 8× is Studio and it invents the most. The shoebox is not a batch until three frames have survived that check.

Keep the print, not our copy of it

Uploads and results are deleted after 24 hours on every plan. A reunion next month will not find the file here. Download the tonal version and, if you accept it, the color version, the same day. Free pages show ads. Commercial use is allowed when you have the rights, including on Free plan. A failed job returns the credit. The fee for Pro or Studio is not refunded, and you can cancel anytime.

The free download of 3,200 px covers a 300 ppi 4×6 and 8×10. A larger sheet is Pro or Studio, which also batch. Do not enlarge a faded file to poster size until the cast and the dust are decisions you can defend. A big pale file is still pale.

HEIC and TIFF are not decoded. Export the scan as JPEG, PNG, WebP, or AVIF. A color negative needs an inversion in the scanner tool first. We do not invert negatives. The API accepts the same formats and the same colorize mode, and it deletes on the same clock.

A worked frame

A 1978 color print is magenta in the shadows and yellow in the border, and the scan is 2000 px on the long edge. The border tells you the paper and the dyes failed together. Correcting that cast belongs in the scan software if you still have the print on the glass. Uploading it so colorize can ‘restore’ the dress will paint the magenta and call it a fabric. If the print is instead a brown black-and-white portrait with clean paper and no tint, denoise the dust for one credit, reject any result that heals a scratch across the coat, and only then colorize for two credits. Keep the brown file. The guess is not a record of the dress. One guest day holds the denoise or the colorize, not a stack of both plus an enlarge, because three credits do not cover one plus two plus another one. Plan the order the day before if the reunion is the deadline. Download before the 24-hour sweep. The shoebox on the shelf is the copy that still exists next month.