Lesson 296 · 3 min
Restoring old family photos
AI can fix scratches, fading and blur in old photos, but it can also invent faces, so keep the original and label the new copy.
That box of black-and-white photos from your grandparents' wedding is precious and fading. AI photo tools can remove scratches, sharpen blurry faces and even add colour in a few seconds.
Here is the catch. When a photo is very damaged, the tool does not recover the real face. It draws a likely face, based on millions of other faces. The result can look sharp and still not look like your grandmother. Colours are guesses too: the AI does not know the real colour of her áo dài.
So treat restored photos as a nice new version, not as the record. Scan the original at high quality and keep it. Name the edited file clearly, such as "restored with AI", so in thirty years nobody mistakes it for the untouched photo.
Do it now
Restore one photo the careful way
- 1. Scan or photograph the original flat, in good light, with no glare.
- 2. Run it through an AI restore tool and compare the faces side by side with the original.
- 3. Ask an older relative whether the faces and colours look right.
- 4. Save it with a clear name and keep the original scan next to it.
I restored an old family photo with AI. Write a short caption I can keep with it that says who is in it, roughly when it was taken, and that faces and colours were enhanced by AI.
Quick check
Words from this lesson
- Image generation
- Creating pictures from a written description, using AI trained on very large collections of images and captions.
- Diffusion model
- A type of AI that makes images or video by starting from random noise and cleaning it up step by step.
- Deepfake
- A fake video, photo or audio clip made with AI to show a real person saying or doing something they never did.