How to Repair Damaged Old Photos: Tears, Scratches, Stains and Water Damage
A damage-by-damage guide to repairing old photographs with AI — what tears, creases, mould, and water stains can actually be recovered from, with a scan checklist and sources.
PhotoRestoration Team
Some old photos do not merely fade — they get folded into pockets, water leaks onto the album, corners are lost to decades in a drawer. The good news is that this kind of damage, dramatic as it looks, is mostly local: the information around the wound usually survives, and that is precisely what a repair model needs. This guide goes through the common types of damage one by one, what each can realistically be recovered from, and the exact workflow we use.
First, handle the print itself
Before any digital work, stop the damage from getting worse — and stop yourself from making it worse. The U.S. National Archives' preservation guidance is built around this principle: handle photos by the edges, never try to peel a stuck photograph from an album page, do not unroll a tightly curled print by force, and separate anything mouldy from the rest of the collection.
Preventing damage is the key to preserving your items.
Two cautions that matter specifically if repair is planned:
- Do not clean mould or mud off yourself with water. Liquid drives stains deeper into the emulsion and can fuse a photo to whatever it is touching. Scan it as it is; digital cleanup works on what is visible.
- Do not flatten a brittle photo against the scanner glass with force. Press gently with a sheet of clean paper instead. Glass-cold, brittle emulsion cracks.
The Library of Congress photograph care pages cover long-term storage properly — acid-free sleeves, stable temperature, away from light — for everything you want to keep safe after the repair.
What each type of damage can (and cannot) recover
Tears and missing corners. A clean tear is the best case: both halves carry real detail, and the model stitches across the gap. A missing piece is different — there is nothing to stitch. The model reconstructs what plausibly belongs there (a sky, a shoulder) from context. Faces that lose a cheek or an eye are the hardest case in all of restoration; treat any such reconstruction as a portrait informed by the photo, not the photo itself.
Creases and folds. A crease breaks the image into a sharp line with local detail loss on each side. Because the loss is narrow, in-painting from both sides usually makes the fold genuinely disappear.
Scratches and pen marks. Surface scratches are thin, high-frequency damage — the easiest class for a model to detect and fill. Ballpoint pen and crayon marks (the kind an aspiring young artist contributed in 1974) are similarly local and mostly recoverable, unless they sit directly across facial features.
Water stains and mould. Stains that darkened or tinted the image usually come out well: the underlying tones survive underneath the stain. Stains that ate the emulsion — where the image is physically gone — become reconstruction, not recovery. Mould in its early, surface stage cleans well digitally; mould that has textured the surface leaves real topography the scan will record.
Fading and silvering. Technically not "damage" in the mechanical sense, but the repair mode treats them together with it: re-densifying a washed-out print is often the single most dramatic improvement a photo gets.
The repair workflow, step by step
- Scan at 600 DPI or higher, photograph side down, on clean glass. For anything torn in two, scan each half, then either rejoin them digitally or let the repair model work across the seam. The full scanning checklist lives in our restoration guide.
- Upload to the repair tool. The free preview shows the result before you pay for the download.
- Run repair before colorize or animate. Damage left in the image contaminates every later step — a scratch becomes a colored streak, a crease becomes a moving artifact in an animation.
- Inspect at 100% zoom, especially across faces and anything structural (a doorframe, a horizon line) where a bad fill is most noticeable.
- Archive the scan, keep the repaired file separately. Never overwrite the original scan with the repaired version — you may want a better repair in five years, and the personal digital archiving principle is always: the source outlives every derivative.
Can a badly torn photo really be repaired?
Almost always better than the owner expects — and it is worth understanding the two different things that can happen when you hand over a torn photo:
- Where the detail survives on both sides of the tear, the repair is recovery: the model reads real texture from each side and closes the gap with it. This covers the majority of torn photos, and the result is legitimately the photograph again.
- Where a piece is missing entirely, the repair is reconstruction: plausible content is generated for the hole. For sky, clothing, background — nobody can tell and nobody is misled. For a face, be honest with the family about what was rebuilt.
This is also why the scan matters more than anything else you control: higher resolution means more surviving real texture for the model to recover with.
Does a digital repair change the historical record?
The photograph's evidentiary value lives in the scan you preserve, not in the file you frame. Repair produces a new, derived image; the untouched scan remains the record of what actually survived. Keep both, label the repaired one as restored, and the family archive loses nothing — it gains a readable version and an honest provenance chain, which is exactly what serious archives do when they conserve and copy.
Frequently asked questions
What kind of scanner do I need?
A flatbed scanner that does 600 DPI handles nearly every family photo. Phone re-photography works in a pinch — even, indirect light, print held flat, no flash — but the shadow gradient a curled print picks up will show up in the repair.
The photo is stuck to the album page. What do I do?
Leave it attached and scan it in the album if the page lies flat; otherwise scan the page as a whole. Physical removal in a humid home is how emulsion comes off with the paper. The National Archives guidance is blunt about this: do not force it.
Can water-damaged photos that stuck together be separated?
Not by you, and not dry. That is a job for a photo conservator — freezing and controlled separation. Scan through the plastic sleeve if you must capture them urgently, then get advice before touching them.
What does repair cost here?
The preview is free; repaired full-resolution downloads cost a few dollars via credit packs. Severely damaged originals are the exact case worth trying first — the model is at its most impressive, and the free preview makes the check cost nothing.