What is AI Photo Restoration?
TL;DR
The use of AI to improve old or damaged photographs through upscaling, scratch and tear repair, and colorization of black-and-white images.
AI Photo Restoration: Definition & Explanation
AI photo restoration uses machine learning to improve old, low-resolution, or damaged photographs. Its core capabilities are upscaling (increasing resolution and reconstructing sharp facial detail in blurry scans), repair (automatically removing scratches, dust, creases, water stains, and torn edges), and colorization (adding plausible color to black-and-white images). Trained on huge datasets of photographs, the models infer what a degraded image likely looked like, which makes the output a reconstruction rather than a recovered original. Leading tools include Remini (face enhancement and upscaling), MyHeritage (Deep Nostalgia animation plus enhancement and colorization within a genealogy platform), Palette.fm (dedicated colorization), Photomyne (scanning and restoring printed photos), and Hotpot (browser-based repair and color). The technology can dramatically revive faded family portraits in seconds, but users should keep their original unedited scans, because AI-enhanced faces and especially AI-added colors are educated estimates, not historically accurate fact.