Old Photo Repair: Fix Scratches, Tears and Stains

Scratches, creases, tears, dust, stains, mould spots and missing corners on a scanned print. It works on the image file, not the physical paper, so the source has to be a scan or a photo of the print.

Partially. A missing corner over background or fabric is rebuilt from the surrounding texture and usually looks natural. A corner that contained part of a face is a guess: the model produces something plausible, not something true. Check that area before you print.

That is the main failure mode of damage removal, and the reason repair is a separate pass instead of one slider. Damage is masked and rebuilt from the grain and structure around it, so paper texture survives. If the result looks waxy, the scan is usually too low-resolution — rescan at 300–600 dpi.

Repair first. Cracks and creases read as edges, and a colorizer will pull colour into them. Run the photo colorizer on the clean file afterwards.

Damage that destroys information rather than covering it: a face burned away or cut out of the print, heavy mould that has eaten the emulsion, water stains that bleached a whole area. The tool can still produce a smooth photo, but the detail you are hoping for is not in the scan.

Damage first, then the unblur tool. Sharpening a crack makes it harder to remove cleanly, and removing damage from an already-sharpened file tends to leave halos.