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Repair a damaged photo free, online

By ShinobiTools Team · Last updated: July 2026

Faded, cracked, creased or water-stained? Upload the photo and PicReviver rebuilds the detail, softens the damage and sharpens the picture, all in your browser, free.

Restore a photo now →

One upload, several repairs

Most damaged prints have more than one thing wrong at once: they're faded and soft and a bit scratched. PicReviver's restoration pass tackles the general damage in a single automatic step, rebuilding lost detail and sharpening edges, and you can then chain the other tools on the same photo if it needs them.

• Restore & sharpen rebuilds soft, faded, low-detail areas
• Restore faces (CodeFormer) brings blurry faces in old group shots back into focus
• Colourise (DDColor) adds natural colour to a black & white or heavily-faded print
• Scratches, cracks and creases soften as the surrounding detail is rebuilt (more on scratches)

How to repair a damaged photo

Start from the best copy you can: a clean scan of the print rather than a phone snap under a lamp gives the model far more to work with. Then let each pass do its job and compare before and after at every step.

1. Scan or photograph the damaged print (see the scanning guide).
2. Open PicReviver and drop it in, restore & sharpen runs automatically.
3. If faces are soft, switch to face restore; if it's black & white, try colourise.
4. Compare, choose your size and download; the photo is then wiped.

Being honest about damage

Be realistic about what any restoration tool can do. PicReviver rebuilds and sharpens detail that is still present in the photo; it is not a clone-stamp or inpainting editor. Fine cracks, creases and small blemishes usually soften noticeably because the surrounding detail gives the model enough to work with, but a chunk that is physically gone, such as a torn-away corner or an area dissolved to blank paper, can't be invented from nothing. Very heavy motion blur or a deeply out-of-focus shot also has hard limits.

The rule of thumb: damage that sits on top of intact detail (fading, softness, thin cracks, light staining) repairs well; detail that is physically gone can't be recreated truthfully. If your main problem is age-fading rather than physical damage, read why old photos fade and start with the restore old photos flow.

Triage: what repairs, and what is simply gone

All photo damage falls into two buckets, and one honest look at your print tells you which you're dealing with. The test is: is there intact detail immediately around the damage?

• Damage that sits on top of detail — overall fading, softness, thin scratches, light staining, surface dust, a mild colour cast. The information is still under there, dimmed or interrupted, and a rebuild pass has plenty of surrounding context to work from. This repairs well, often startlingly well.
• Damage where the information is gone — a torn-off corner, a hole, a crease that has cracked the emulsion away, ink or mould covering a face, a print stuck to another print and pulled apart. No tool can recover what was never captured or no longer exists; it can only invent something plausible in that spot, and on a face that means a stranger's features.

Both can be worth doing, but they call for different expectations. For bucket one, expect a repair. For bucket two, expect an improvement everywhere except the hole, and consider whether a visible mark that is honest is better than a smooth patch that is fiction, especially for a family archive.

One print, several passes, in this order

Most damaged photos have more than one problem at once: faded and soft and a bit scratched. Work through them deliberately rather than expecting one upload to do everything.

1. Digitise well first — flatbed at 600 dpi, out of the frame. See getting an old photo to HD for the details.
2. Restore and sharpen to rebuild the soft, faded, low-detail areas. This is also the pass that softens fine scratches and speckle, as a side effect of rebuilding the detail around them.
3. Faces with the CodeFormer pass if the people are the point of the photo.
4. Colour last, if you want it: either colourise a black-and-white print, or use it to even out a discoloured one.
5. Enlarge only at the end, to the size you'll print or share.

Keep the untouched scan. It costs a few megabytes and it is the only version that is evidence rather than interpretation, which matters more than people expect once a photo is the last one of somebody.

Common questions