What the tool actually does
Damage detection works like a restorer’s first pass. The tool computes, for every pixel, what its surroundings would look like with narrow damage smoothed away — and compares. A dust speck or a scratch line sits far above or below its smoothed neighbourhood, so it is marked; a real edge survives the smoothing unchanged, so it is never mistaken for damage. Marks are widened slightly so the whole width of a scratch is caught, and the sensitivity slider sets how far out of line a pixel must be before it counts.
The repair borrows from the photo itself. Marked pixels are filled ring by ring from the nearest intact pixels inward — the same way watercolour bleeds outward from a wet edge — and the fill is smoothed twice so it does not look mechanical. Skies and clothing blend so well the scratch simply vanishes; a scratch crossing a face or lettering comes out soft, because the tool fills rather than reconstructs.
The two brushes are the final word. Repair marks anything the scan missed: long creases, tears, pen marks. Protect removes marks — from over-eager detection or a slip of the brush — and protected pixels stay original no matter how often you change the sensitivity.
Old photos usually need two passes
Physical damage and color fade are different injuries. Scratches, dust and creases are handled here; the orange or washed-out cast that decades-old prints develop is measured and corrected by the faded photo color restorer. A photo that comes out of a shoebox usually needs both — and the result is worth printing properly or collecting with the rest of the family archive through images to PDF.
Grandparents’ class photos from the 1950s are also the raw material for a gift with a twist: after repairing, turn one into a coloring page and let the grandchildren meet their grandfather as a schoolboy in color. The Christmas hub’s fix-then-gift section is where the repaired print becomes that present — framed, it is the kind that gets kept.
And when the damage sat on the film itself rather than the paper — a scratch across the negative that every print inherited — the guide What do you do with a box of old photo negatives? walks the whole journey from the orange strip to the repaired print.
What honest repair means here
Restoration services that promise to “reconstruct” a torn photo are guessing — sometimes beautifully, always on their server, with your family’s only copy of the picture. This tool takes the opposite bargain: it only moves information that is already in the photo, which is why it can promise that nothing leaves your browser. When a scratch has destroyed the content beneath it, no honest tool can return it; what this one does is make the damage stop being the first thing you see.
Questions
Is this an AI tool?
No. The scan uses a method photo editors have used for decades: each pixel is compared with what its neighbourhood would look like with the damage smoothed away. A scratch or dust speck stands far out against that comparison; an edge — a roofline, a profile — does not, because smoothing does not change it. Marked areas are then filled in from the surrounding photo. The tool never invents content: whatever was under a deep scratch is gone, and no software can honestly bring it back.
What damage does it fix best?
Dust specks, thin scratches and creases — especially across smooth areas like sky, walls and clothing, where the fill has clean surroundings to borrow from. On busy patterns such as foliage or printed text everything looks like an outlier, so the automatic scan finds little; brush carefully there, and use Protect on anything that should stay as it is.
The automatic scan marked something that is not damage. Now what?
Lower the scratch sensitivity, or switch the brush to Protect and paint over the wrongly marked spot — protected pixels are never repaired, and protection survives sensitivity changes.
Can it rebuild a missing corner or a torn-away piece?
No. That part of the picture no longer exists, and filling it would mean inventing it. For damage that large, a professional restorer or an AI restoration service is the honest answer — be aware that both will ask you to upload the photo.
What about photos that have faded or turned orange?
That is a different job with a different fix: color that has drifted can be measured and slid back. Use the faded photo color restorer next door — many old prints need both tools, scratches first or color first, the order does not matter.
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No. Detection, filling and the download all happen in the page you have open. Nothing is sent to a server, there is no watermark on the result, no daily limit, and no account is needed.
What happens with a very large scan?
The repair works on a long side of up to 2400 pixels, whatever size the scan was — enough for a sharp print about 20 cm wide. Both the preview and the download use that size. If your scan is bigger, it is made smaller first; nothing is uploaded either way.