u/pixelmac

Hi everyone,

I am trying to restore some old, damaged, blurry photographs using Draw Things on my Mac (M2 Max, 64GB RAM) while signed into the Draw Things+ Cloud Tier.

My goal is to take an old photo, clean up the scratches/blemishes, and sharply reconstruct the blurry facial features without altering the actual identity of the people.

I have already pre-cropped the photos externally to remove the physical paper margins, so I am strictly focused on inner pixel repair and facial sharpening.

What I have tried so far:

1. Qwen Image Edit 2511 (BF16): I ran this in Text-to-Image mode using direct instructions (e.g., "repair photo, remove scratches"). It consistently gave me terrible results—severe vertical stretching, smudging, a heavy blue/cyan color cast on monochrome images, and low-resolution output. Changing samplers (Euler A vs. UniPC Trailing) did not solve the stretching or blur.
2. Standard Image-to-Image (I2I) Models: I tried switching to a traditional Image-to-Image workflow using descriptive prompts. Even when dialing the Denoising Strength all the way down to 0.15 with a completely blank prompt, the models still bleed through and subtly modify or warp the faces into different people, rather than just sharpening the original features.
3. Built-in Face Restoration: I tried enabling restoreformer_v1.0_f16.ckpt alongside a low-strength generation, but because I have to keep the strength so low to prevent identity shifting, the final output remains too soft and blurry.

What is the definitive workflow for this?

• Which base model is actually the king of photo restoration in Draw Things? I am entirely open to downloading or using any model architecture that handles this better than Qwen.
• Is there a specific combination of a model and a dedicated Restoration LoRA (like a CodeFormer or GFPGAN implementation) that completely locks facial structures?
• Should I be using a specific ControlNet (like Canny or Tile) to force the engine to respect the exact original lines of the face?
• Is there an automated script or a better Multi-Pass / Inpainting technique I should be using instead of a standard Image-to-Image pass over the whole canvas?

Any ready-to-paste JSON configurations, specific model recommendations, or workflow step guides would be incredibly appreciated. Thank you!