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Restoring scanned photographs and negatives

Album prints and 35 mm scans digitised once, years ago, and now too small to print at any useful size.

Last updated 7 September 2026

Most family archives were digitised once, in one sitting, at whatever the scanner was set to that afternoon. The prints went back in the box, the files went onto a drive, and nobody looked at the resolution again until somebody wanted a print made.

What is usually wrong with the file

It is small. A flatbed run at 300 dpi over a 6×4 print gives about 1800×1200. That is fine on a screen and short of what a lab wants for anything larger than the original.

It carries the scanner’s softness, not the negative’s. Consumer flatbeds resolve noticeably less than the film in front of them. The grain you can see is often the scanner’s sampling rather than the emulsion’s, which is why scanning the same print again at a higher setting frequently returns very little extra.

It has been compressed, sometimes twice. Scanning software writes JPEG by default, and the file has usually been copied through a photo service since.

What comes back

Sharpness along edges that the scanner smeared, texture in fabric and hair that the JPEG pass flattened, and enough resolution to print at a size the original scan could not carry. Film grain is generally preserved rather than removed — it is real detail in the source, and taking it out makes a photograph look like a painting of itself.

What enhancement does not recover is anything the print itself lost: fading, color shift from decades in an album, tearing, or the softness of an original that was out of focus in 1974. The first three of those are Restore’s job rather than Enhance’s, and a box with a lot of them is worth sending there. The fourth is nobody’s: a photograph that missed focus in 1974 missed it permanently.

A practical order of work

1. Scan once, as large as the scanner honestly offers. Enhancement works from what is there, so a better scan is always the cheaper improvement. Beyond the scanner’s real optical resolution the extra pixels are empty, and it is worth finding out where that point is rather than trusting the maximum in the menu.
2. Scan to a lossless format if the software allows it. One compression pass avoided is one class of damage that never has to be undone.
3. Run one pass, not several. Compare the result against the original before deciding whether it needs anything else. Most of the time it does not.
4. Keep the original scan. It is the record. The enhanced file is a derivative and should be treated as one, particularly for anything genealogical.

Doing a boxful

An archive is rarely one photograph. Once you have confirmed a setting on a handful of representative scans — one faded color print, one black and white, one that was already sharp — the rest is the same call repeated, which is what the API is for. Start with your first API call.

Before committing a large batch, it is worth reading what it will not do, and worth sorting the box in two: prints that are merely soft or small go to Enhance, and prints that are torn, stained or badly faded go to Restore. Sorting first is cheaper than running everything twice.