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This free AI tool restores all your old photos in seconds

If you’re anywhere around my age, I’m sure you have a bunch of photos of your parents and grandparents that have seen better days (the photos, not your ancestors). Anyhow, you can now take those old, scratched, crinkled, and torn prints and restore them without any prior Photoshop knowledge.

A neural network called GFP-GAN (Generative Facial Prior-Generative Adversarial Network) restores your old and damaged photos with impressive speed and accuracy. But just like all AI-based tools, this one has downsides as well. So, let’s check out the good and the bads and see what it has to offer.

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New Photoshop update will restore an old photo in a single click

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The latest update of Adobe Photoshop includes the ability to restore an old photo in just one click, thanks to the software’s groundbreaking addition to their Neural Filters. Called ‘Photo Restoration’, the new filter uses AI to assess what needs to be fixed and uses tools such as content-aware fill to automatically ‘heal’ the image.

The Neural Filters have been around since 2020, and include things like generating a shallow depth of field effect in portrait images, making a landscape image look as though it was shot in winter, and colourising black and white photographs. So not only can you now restore an old photo but you could also colourise it too.

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Photographer restores and colorizes vintage photos of 26 US presidents

James Berridge of JBColourisation has already demonstrated his impressive restoration and colorization skills. In his recent project, he embarked on a demanding task to make a large chunk of US history more relatable to the 21st-century folks. He restored and colorized 26 presidential portraits. All of those photos that were photographed in black & white now have their restored, colored version.

After he finished the process, James shared a video that, for the first time, shows all US presidents in color. And in another video, he spoke more about his process, the challenges he faced, and why he decided to start this project in the first place.

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MyHeritage photo enhancer shows you what your ancestors really looked like

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We’ve seen some pretty epic examples of manual photo restoration and colorization. But there’s now a website that promises equally impressive results. MyHeritage uses neural networks to restore your old photos and give them color. And judging from the examples, it truly does a pretty good job for artificial intelligence.

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Mother and baby reunited after 116 years in this incredible photo restoration

Photo restoration and colorization gives new life and new dimension to damaged old photographs. A recent video from James Berridge of JBColourisation shows just how impressive this process can be. He used a heavily damaged diptych of mother and her baby from circa 1903, with the damage splitting the image apart. In his timelapse video, you can see how he fixed it and “reunited” the mother and her child after 116 years.

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This new technique recovers even the most damaged daguerreotypes

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Daguerreotypes break down with time and can eventually become ruined and unrecognizable. But researchers at Western University in Canada have created a new technique that recovers even the most damaged daguerreotypes. It reveals what lies under the severe degradation and shows the images in all their original detail.

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Nvidia’s “content-aware” cloning tools use deep learning AI for incredibly realistic results

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When the Content-Aware Fill tools were added to Photoshop a number of years back, they were hailed as being the best thing since Photoshop itself was created. Now, with a couple of clicks, you could get rid of the stuff you didn’t want in your image and Photoshop would magically replace it with what you wanted. The reality was that it didn’t always do what it said on the tin, leading to the nickname “Content-Aware Fail”.

It’s come a long way since then. It’s smarter than it was, and soon it may expand to include fill sources from Adobe’s vast stock library. Nvidia’s taking a slightly different approach, though, using deep learning AI to help fill in the gaps, and while the aesthetics are still fairly primitive, the AI seems to do a great job of recognising what’s what.

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Restoration artist gives new life to 100-years-old photos of baseball players

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We’ve shown you some amazing colorization and restoration work before. But if you are a baseball fan, you will definitely love the series we’re about to show you today.

Chris Whitehouse is a sports lover and a photo restoration and colorization artist. He brings his two passions together, and as a result, he breathes a new life into century-old photos of Major League baseball players and games. Using Photoshop and lots of patience, skill, and research, he teleports us to the baseball fields from 100 years ago and creates a new look on the history of sports.

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This photo retoucher gives new life to even the most damaged photos

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How many old photos do you have in your family archives that seem to be damaged beyond repair? Ukrainian photo retoucher magician Tetyana Dyachenko would be able to restore them. She specializes in photo retouching and uses this skill to restore old photos. Thanks to her Photoshop skills and eye for detail, she gives new life to even the most damaged photos.

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Algorithmia colorizes your black and white photos, but they have much to improve

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Photo colarization is a thing. We want to look at color photos, but we only had black and white film a few decades ago, so there is a gap to fulfill. I guess our kids will want to hologrimize our colored photos when they grow up, but this is another story).

Up till now, colorizing has been an intense and laborious process taking hours of work from skilled artists. A new algorithm from Algorithmia wants to change that. Algorithmia released a new cloud platform that takes in a black and white photo and spits out a colorized version of it. The idea is that you can instantly create a color photo from an old black and white print of say Dear Aunt Daisy.

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