Restoring Old Photos: Upscaling Scans and Fixing Framing
The yellowed ID photos and re-photographed prints in family albums come out of the scanner small and soft. Super-resolution can double the size and recover some detail — but it is not magic, and knowing the limits is how you keep expectations honest.
Three things before any restoration
Scan quality caps everything: use 600dpi or higher for restoration scans, and re-shoot prints under even light, square to the frame. If the source is a blur, upscaling invents nothing useful — garbage in, garbage out remains the first law of restoration.
Do the free work first: rotate misoriented scans upright (sideways scans are the norm for old albums) and crop out album-page edges, tape, and finger shadows before any processing. These cost nothing and make every later step cleaner.
Upscaling: what it saves and what it cannot
The upscale model doubles the image, reconstructing edges and textures from learned patterns. It clearly improves: mild blur, graininess from enlarging small prints, light scanning compression. It cannot fix: severe out-of-focus capture, large physical damage (tears, deep scratches), facial detail that was never captured — the model fills in plausible guesses, not lost information.
Practical notes: keep inputs within 1 megapixel (downscale oversized scans first), and the output is a 2x lossless PNG. Faces are where upscaling shines and the improvement is most visible; landscapes and text benefit more quietly.
Finishing the restoration
Crop for composition after upscaling: the doubled image has headroom for reframing, and cropping last is the universal order in photo restoration. Save results as lossless PNG — do not lose the recovered detail to a JPEG round-trip.
For print, the 2x output covers common 3-inch to 5-inch prints; for screen-only use, a high-quality JPEG export is fine. Note the settings per photo — whole scan batches reuse them.