Scanning prints for old photo restoration
Everything later depends on the scan, so it is worth doing well once. Use a flatbed scanner if you can: the print lies flat, the light is even and nothing is photographed at an angle. Wipe the glass with a soft, lint-free cloth before each session and brush dust off the print, because every speck on the glass becomes a spot in the file, and the upscaler will enlarge that spot as faithfully as the faces around it.
Scan small prints at 600 DPI or higher. At 600 DPI a 6×4-inch print becomes 3600×2400 pixels and a wallet-size print about 1500×2100. Scan black-and-white and sepia prints in color mode too, which keeps their warm tones; you can convert to grayscale later. Save the scan as PNG, or as a JPG at the highest quality setting, so the file does not start out with compression damage.
Handle prints by the edges, and scan photos stuck in old self-adhesive albums on the page rather than forcing them out. Name each file with a year and the people in it.
No scanner? Photographing prints with a phone
A phone can stand in for a scanner if you control the light. Work near a window in daylight but out of direct sun, or use two lamps at equal angles on either side of the print so the light is even. Turn the flash off, since it leaves a bright hot spot on glossy paper, and take the print out of its frame, because glass reflects the room and you.
Hold the phone straight above the print and parallel to it, so the rectangle does not turn into a trapezoid. Use the main lens rather than digital zoom, fill the frame without cutting the edges, tap to focus on a face and take several shots. Then crop to the edges of the print before uploading: in Photo mode the browser shrinks anything over about 2.25 megapixels before a 4x run, so pixels spent on the tabletop are taken from the photo.
Whole scan or close crop: what to send to the upscaler
Here is the point most people miss in old photo restoration. In Photo mode, big images are reduced first, to about 6 megapixels for 2x and 2.25 for 4x, and the output is based on the reduced version, so a big scan loses resolution before it gains any. A 600 DPI scan of a 6×4 print is about 8.6 megapixels: 2x starts from about 3000×2000 and returns 6000×4000, while 4x starts from only about 1837×1225.
Upscaling pays off when the starting image is small: a wallet or passport photo, a contact print, an old low-resolution scan, a picture a relative sent through a chat app, or a crop of one face from a larger scan. Crops are the most useful case for old photo restoration. Cut the area you care about from the full scan, keep it under about 2.25 megapixels so it goes in at full detail even at 4x, and a 600×400 crop at 4x comes back as 2400×1600. If a whole scan already has enough pixels for your print, skip the upscale.
What AI upscaling adds to old photo restoration
Within old photo restoration, the upscaler's job is to make a small or soft image hold up at a bigger size. It adds pixels with learned detail, firms up edges and reduces softness, film grain, scan noise and JPEG blocks to a degree. The gain shows most in enlargements: a print from the upscaled file tends to look crisper than one made by stretching the original, and a small portrait can be shared full screen or printed for a frame.
Behind Photo mode is Real-ESRGAN, the same model the Basic and Screenshot presets use; the mode names are presets rather than separate engines, and face enhancement stays off. Anime mode, which uses another Real-ESRGAN build tuned for cartoons and line art, is the wrong choice for photographs. Use 4x for small prints and tight crops, and 2x when the scan is already a fair size and you only need some extra room.
What it does not fix: tears, stains, fading, color and faces
Be clear about the limits of AI old photo restoration before you start. The upscaler does not repair tears, creases, scratches, stains or missing corners; to the model they are part of the picture, so a crease across a face can come out as crisp as the face. It does not correct fading, yellowing or color casts, and it does not colorize black-and-white photos, which come back black-and-white.
Faces are handled honestly too. With face enhancement off, the tool will not invent features, smooth skin or change expressions, so relatives keep their own faces, but a face that is only a blur, such as someone out of focus at the back of a group, stays a blur. In old photo restoration, all of these repairs are manual work in an image editor: healing and clone tools for scratches, dust and tears, levels or curves for fading, and hand coloring or a separate process for color.
A realistic workflow from scan to print
A realistic old photo restoration sequence for a family archive is: scan the print, upscale the scan or a crop of it here, retouch the upscaled copy in an image editor, then print or share. Retouching after upscaling means your healing and clone work happens at the final size, and your brush strokes are never enlarged by the model.
Keep the original print and the untouched scan as the archival master and never overwrite either; work on copies named for what was done, such as scan, upscaled and retouched. Guest results here are deleted after 7 days (signed-in results stay in your workspace), so download the upscaled file and store it with the original scan in at least two places, such as a computer and an external drive.
For a whole album, scan in one session and upscale in batches. Note any crease or stain the bigger size reveals, ready for retouching.
Printing and sharing the restored photo
For prints, divide the pixel dimensions by 300 to get the size in inches at 300 pixels per inch, a common target for photo prints. The 600×400 crop from earlier becomes 2400×1600 at 4x, enough for 8 × 5.3 inches at that density. For bigger prints, ask your print service what resolution it needs before ordering.
For sharing, the retouched file is usually larger than anyone needs. Export a smaller copy for messages and email, around 2000 pixels on the long side for example, and keep the full-size file for printing. A photo book or a slideshow at a family gathering is also a good moment to record names and dates for each picture.