Scanning old photographs and cleaning them up
Most of the quality of a restored photograph is decided at the scanner, before any processing happens at all.
Steps
- Scan at a high resolution
Scan the print at 600 dpi or more. You cannot add resolution later that you did not capture. - Save the scan as PNG
Avoid JPEG for the master scan, so you are not repairing compression you introduced yourself. - Process the scan
Drop it onto Pixmend, choose the photo model, and set noise reduction to match the grain. - Keep both files
Store the untouched scan alongside the processed version.
The largest single decision in restoring an old photograph happens before any software is involved: how you scan it. Get that wrong and no amount of processing afterwards makes up the difference, because the information was never captured in the first place.
Scan for more than you need
Scan the print at 600 dpi or higher. A 10-centimetre print at 600 dpi gives you roughly 2400 pixels across, which is enough to work with; the same print at 150 dpi gives you 600, and nothing downstream can invent the rest.
If the print is small, or if the detail you care about is a face in the background, go higher still. Scanning is the one step where the information is either recorded or lost forever, and re-scanning later means finding the physical print again.
Save the scan as PNG, not JPEG. A JPEG master scan means you have introduced compression damage on top of the damage already in the photograph, and you will spend the rest of the process removing your own artefacts.
What can be repaired, and what cannot
| Problem | Repairable |
|---|---|
| Scanner grain and paper texture | Yes |
| Softness from a low-resolution scan | Yes |
| Print grain from the original film | Partly — it is real detail as much as noise |
| Camera focus or motion blur in the original shot | No |
| Physical damage: creases, tears, missing corners | No |
| Fading and colour shift | No — this is a colour problem, not a detail one |
The last two rows matter for expectation-setting. Enlarging and cleaning a photograph does not repaint a torn corner and does not correct a colour cast. Those are separate jobs, and an upscaler that claimed to do them would be inventing content rather than restoring it.
Processing the scan
- Drop the scan onto Pixmend. It stays in your browser — worth noting for family photographs, which tend to be the least replaceable images anyone owns.
- Choose the photo model.
- Choose x2 first. Old prints often carry less real detail than their pixel count suggests, and a conservative factor keeps the result honest.
- Set noise reduction to match what you are seeing: higher for a grainy scan, lower for a clean one, because film grain is partly genuine detail and flattening it makes the image look artificial.
- Compare at 100% before downloading.
A 1024-pixel-square region at x4 finishes in about 7.1 seconds with the photo model on an Apple Silicon laptop, so trying several settings costs very little time.
Keep the original scan
Store the untouched scan next to the processed version, permanently.
Processing choices that look right today may not look right in five years, and models improve. The scan is the irreplaceable artefact — the physical print will keep fading whether or not you look at it, and at some point the file will be all that is left.
A note on faces
Faces are where restoration goes wrong most visibly. A model reconstructing detail on a heavily degraded face is working with very little information, and small reconstruction errors read as "that is not quite them" to anyone who knew the person.
The models used here reconstruct what is present rather than generating what might plausibly be there, which makes them conservative on faces by design. If a face still comes out wrong, the honest conclusion is that the detail was not in the scan — and the fix is a better scan of the original print, not a stronger setting.