u/Icy_Health491

My grandma passed last year and we found a box of photos from the 60s and 70s, all faded, scratched, some water-damaged. I wanted to make prints for the family reunion so I went down a rabbit hole of AI photo restoration tools.

Quick context: I'm not a professional photographer. I just wanted usable results without a steep learning curve.

What I tried:

Adobe Lightroom (AI Denoise) - Already had a subscription so this was my first stop. The denoise is genuinely excellent for recent RAW files, but it struggled with the kind of heavy degradation in old scans. Not really built for restoration work.

MyHeritage Photo Enhancer - Made specifically for old family photos which seemed perfect. Face colorization is fun but the results felt a bit cartoonish. Free tier is very limited and the paywall kicks in fast.

Gigapixel AI - The upscaling quality is hard to argue with. Edges come out really clean. But it's purely an upscalerit doesn't handle color restoration or scratch removal, so you'd need to combine it with other tools.

Clipdrop - Browser-based, easy to use, decent for quick cleanups. The enhance feature worked okay on my phone shots but didn't do much for the really degraded old scans.

HitPaw FotorPea - This one surprised me. The face restoration on older portraits was noticeably better than the others. Faded skin tones came back looking natural rather than over-processed. I also used the text prompt editing to clean up a damaged background on one photo and it actually held up. It's a desktop download but the workflow is straightforward.

For my specific use case - old portraits, natural-looking results, minimal fiddling. HitPaw FotorPea ended up being the one I used for the final prints. YMMV depending on what you're working with.

Anyone else done something similar? Curious what tools people are using for this kind of project.

Hey!

Looking for AI art tools with no watermark + free credits. Most I find either watermark or limit too hard. Free daily credits is fine, just need clean exports 🙏