Retouching can improve old photos that still have good detail and resolution. But when an old picture is very faded or damaged, photo restoration is needed to rebuild and recreate the image.
The old portrait above has faded so much that most of the clothing detail is gone. Fortunately, the most important parts, the faces, are still discernible.
Artificial Intelligence To The Rescue
Most photo restoration today begins with AI-powered software. If artificial intelligence can detect faces, it can often, but not always, reconstruct them convincingly. Depending on how badly the image has degraded, the restored faces may or may not closely resemble the originals.
Restoring clothing and other details is less reliable. When these elements have faded or blurred beyond recognition, AI can only guess.
In this example photo, the restored faces reasonably match the original subjects, but the clothing does not. The AI-generated clothes were an educated guess at what clothing was common at the time the photo was taken. Manual retouching was used to modify the AI-generated clothes so that they better resemble the original clothing.
In photo restoration, accurate facial reconstruction matters most, and clothing simply needs to look plausible.
Thanks to AI, restoring old photos has become faster and easier. Even so, AI restorations usually require manual retouching to correct errors, fill in missing details, and refine the final image.
