Photoshop has a new Photo Restoration function that is easy to use. You may use their AI-trained filter to help restore old or damaged photographs.
What is Photo Restoration exactly?
Photo Restoration is available in Photoshop Beta. Adobe announced it in June 2022. It restores aged or damaged photos by employing a new Neural Filter that uses AI. You may use basic editing options or further refine them using further adjustments. These are all sliders and are easy to use.
How do you use it?
To access the filter, go to Filter > Neural Filters > Photo Restoration and switch the toggle to “on.” This will initiate the filter download and activate it for use if you haven’t downloaded it previously.
When you switch the toggle to “on,” Photoshop will automatically engage the main editing features and restore the photo. Typically, this will take a short while. The speed in part depends on the speed of your computer as well as other variables.
Main editing features
- Photo enhancement — Improve color, contrast, and details
- Enhance faces — Improve the detail on face specifically
- Scratch reduction — Restore areas of the photo that have been scratched or damaged (off by default)
If your photo is scratched or damaged, engage the slider. You will have to wait again as the Neural Filter examines and processes the photo.
Adjustments
If your photo requires more work, you can open the Adjustments section underne to access more sliders for the following:
- Noise reduction
- Color noise reduction
- Halftone artifact reduction
- JPEG artifacts reduction
Technical stuff
I rarely had to wait more than 20 seconds for any of the adjustments on a mid-2017 27″ i7 iMac. However, if you have an older computer, you might wait a little longer.
Photo Restoration appeared automatically in Photoshop 2023 (Version 24.0.0). However, it did not appear in Photoshop 2022 (Version 23.5.2). I attempted to download Photoshop Beta from the Creative Cloud Desktop. However, it still did not appear in Photoshop 2022.
I should mention that when I opened Photoshop 2023, I received a pop-up dialogue box that stated, “Mac OS X version 11.7.0 or later is recommended for maximum performance and correct operation of Adobe Photoshop 2023. An earlier version of Mac OS X was detected.”
Conclusion
It’s really nice to be able to restore older photos so easily and quickly. The features for the face enhancement, general sharpening and detail extraction worked quite well. Using the more advanced features, I was also able to remove some yellowing from images.
There were times in which Photo Restoration eliminated wires and even a rope for a crowd control stanchion, interpreting these as cracks or damage in the image. You may address this by adjusting the slider until it is to your liking.
This could be a game changer! I have hundreds of old family photos and slides. Some of the slides are so old I was in diapers.
Trying it out on my desktop computer and realize this 2013 antique is in need of more power. I’ll try it on my laptop and see how that goes.
So far, I’m rather pleased with this. And to think that it’s still in beta. And I know all about having those older machines. We are still using a couple of Mac laptops from 2012. My Pro Tools setup is a 2006 Mac Pro 1,1, but I ONLY run Pro Tools on there, so it’s a machine frozen in time, and with SSD and extra RAM, it still runs very quickly and efficiently. But that’s more the exception, not the rule, I think, haha!
That feature is looking great, at least in the article. I tried to use it on a couple of my photos and while it worked with some of them, it didn’t work with others. Especially those that have significant damage on the face or any parts of photos missing. It may help with some images that have very low levels of damage, but with anything, it is sadly useless. Also, the colorization feature is looking pretty bad, to be honest, I would instead some AI like the palette.fm, it is completely free and does really awesome job of colorization. After… Read more »
I randomly “grabbed” those photos, and as you can see, they weren’t perfect either. To be fair, this is Photoshop Beta, so expecting it to be perfect would not be realistic anyway. I would imagine that anything that has significant damage on the face would be a bit too much. I don’t believe you could ever go wrong with a quality professional photo restoration service. After all, you’re paying for people’s expertise and knowledge over a machine’s best guess. But this is very nice for touching up old photos, and I look forward to seeing what they do in subsequent… Read more »
This is pretty cool and very informative, Ken!
Thank you so much for sharing!
You are most welcome, glad it’s helpful. Remember, it’s beta, so sometimes it’s a bit wonky.