I Used AI to Restore Old Photos (Real Results) – Aiarty Image Enhancer

How to restore old family photos using AI.

Try Aiarty Image Enhancer for free: https://tinyurl.com/2mjamajw

Get a lifetime license with exclusive discount: https://tinyurl.com/24parnzs

In this tutorial, I take some old family photos and show how to restore them step by step using Aiarty Image Enhancer.

The photographs I restore are original prints, some over 70 years old, that have been scanned using a flatbed scanner, so this is a real-world test of how well AI can fix damaged, faded, and low-resolution images.

I demonstrate how to remove creases, reduce noise, improve sharpness, restore detail, and upscale old photos for better viewing and printing.

This is not a one-click process. I show how manually guiding the AI gives more natural and realistic results compared to fully automated tools.


Key takeaway:

The quality of the final result depends heavily on the quality of the original image. With better scans or higher resolution photos, AI restoration tools can produce significantly better results.


Try Aiarty Image Enhancer for free: https://tinyurl.com/2mjamajw

Get a lifetime license with exclusive discount: https://tinyurl.com/24parnzs

About the Creator

I’m Craig “Vinnie” Whitehead, a UK photographer creating videos about practical photography with simple cameras.

On this channel I explore both 35mm film and digital photography, with a focus on compact cameras, classic film cameras, and straightforward editing workflows. The goal is simple: make photography accessible, affordable, and enjoyable without needing expensive gear.

Most of my work centres around street, urban, landscape, and everyday photography. Showing how you can create meaningful photographs with the cameras you already have.

Explore More

Website: https://www.vinsta360.co.uk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Vinsta360

00:00 - Introduction
00:36 - Family Photographs
01:21 - Aiarty Image Enhancer
02:21 - Importing photos
02:51 - AI Processing Models
03:35 - Image Upscaling Options
04:06 - Photo Editing
04:19 - Face Restoration
04:48 - AI Eraser Tool
05:06 - Export Options
05:21 - How I restored an old photograph
08:06 - Limitations
11:09 - Thoughts
11:56 - Showing the photos to my family

#AiartyImageEnhancer #PhotoEnhancer #RestoreOldPhotos

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Closed Caption:

In this video, I'm going to show you how
I took an old photo like this and used
an image enhancer to restore it so I
could print it off like this. But this
isn't any old photo. This is a
photograph of me grandma and granddad on
their honeymoon in 1949.
Recently, I took a trip to my parents
where I saw me mom and me auntie Judith
and we went through some old family
photographs and talked about what it
would mean to them to have them
restored.
>> When you start looking at these
photographs, you start reminiscing about
years gone by. This is a picture of uh
me and your dad. This is a picture of
mom and dad uh probably before they were
married at the back of the pub where my
dad lived and uh with his dog Rex. I've
been given these photographs from from
my mom and dad um and afterwards sorting
them out after they passed away and um
I'd like to frame some and put them up
in in our house. I'd just uh like to see
them better quality and what have you
because uh they deteriorate over the
years and it just brings back memories
and we've got families what we could
talk about. The program that I used to
restore these old family photographs is
called Image Enhancer by AIT.
And I'd like to take this moment to
thank AIT for sending me their software
and sponsoring this video. This has
given me the opportunity to restore
these old family photographs, which I'm
sure me mom and me auntie will be
absolutely delighted with. And later in
the video, I'm going to take these
photos back to my parents' house and
show them exactly what I've done with
this software. So, if you like what you
see, please use the link in the video
description below where you can get
yourself a little bit of discount from
this program and I might make a little
bit of commission and that would be
really good for supporting this channel.
So, let's jump into AIT's image enhancer
and I'll show you everything you need to
know about this program. Importing
images into a image enhancer is really
easy. You select the photos you'd like
to process and drag and drop them into
the film strip at the bottom of the
program. The AI model processing will
begin immediately. This can take a
little time to complete. There are
various different AI models that can be
used to process the image. These can be
selected using the drop- down menu. The
three main models we'll look at are as
follows. More detail. This generates
more details in the image, more clarity
and sharpness. It will deblur and dn
noiseise the image for better skin and
hair. It has better perceptual quality.
There is AI GC smooth which has improved
support for AI generated images more
clarity and smoother better quality and
also real photo version 3 specially used
for photo restoration for better
fidelity more clarity to restore
original photos and it also includes
DBlur and D noiseise. The next feature
in the image processing chain is image
upscaling. For this particular image, I
have the ability to upscale by up to
eight times or up to an 8K resolution.
However, when using the AI real photo
processing model, you can only upscale
an image by two times. Next, we can
enable two pass processing, and this
will allow us to run a second pass using
either the AI more detail model or the
AI smooth model. We can of course adjust
the overall strength of the AI
processing. And then we move on to
editing the image. Here we can make
adjustments to the color and exposure of
the image including adjusting the
temperature, the tint, exposure,
contrast, saturation, highlights and
shadows, whites and blacks. And then we
come to one of AIRT image enhancers main
features, face restoration. This is
ideal for highfidelity restoration of
lowresolution images and blurry faces.
It's ideal for enhancing old or
lowquality portraits like the ones I'm
going to be fixing in this video. There
is a feature that will allow us to take
a standard dynamic range image and
upgrade that to a high dynamic range
image. There is an AI eraser tool that
allows us to remove unwanted artifacts
within the image. This includes tears,
rips, scratches, and folds on old
photographs, and I'll demonstrate how to
do this later in the video. The last
feature allows us to add text to an
image. And finally, once we finish
processing the image, we can choose our
export settings, the location we'd like
to export the file to, and whether we'd
like to export a single file or batch
export all the images that we've
processed. Now, we've been through all
the features of AI Arty's image
enhancer. I'm going to show you how I
restored some of these photographs. But
before we jump into that, I have to let
you know that these images were scanned
using an old Canon scanner that is
almost 15 years old. And that resulted
in some really low resolution images
that were less than 2 megabytes in size.
Using such low quality scans really is
going to put the image enhancer to the
test. To restore this image, I'm using
the real photo AI model upscaled x 2 and
a second pass processing with the more
detail model. I've also got the face
restoration option selected for this
image. Now I'm going to show you how I
use the AI eraser tool to remove the
crease in the photograph and some of the
specks of dust. By using the brush tool
to select a specific artifact that needs
removing from the image, you eliminate
AI processing using any guesswork and it
can target a specific area of the image
for restoration.
Once I've selected the main crease in
this image and some of the smaller ones,
I move on to selecting some of the dust
spots that are on the image. To do this,
I reduce the size of the brush to target
the individual dust spots more
specifically. Once I've selected all the
elements that I'd like to erase, I click
apply and allow AIT to do the
processing. Now I'm going to restore
this image and try and make it look like
a bit more of a traditional black and
white image and add some contrast and
depth back in so it doesn't look as
faded. To do that, I've reduce the color
temperature, increase the contrast,
reduce the saturation, and I'm going to
adjust the blacks ever so slightly and
also try and darken those shadows. Maybe
just lift the highlights a little bit.
And I think that looks pretty good.
Let's see a before and let's see an
after. So, as you can see, AIT has done
quite an amazing job on restoring this
particular image. However, if we zoom
in, I just want to point out something.
One of the tendencies the AIT has is to
add a little bit of color into the lips.
Now, on a black and white photo, that
can kind of add a purplish blue tinge to
the lips. It's just one of those things
that hopefully could be fixed in a
future update of this program. Now
you've seen just how powerful the image
enhancer is restoring that small old
photograph and I can assure you it did
an amazing job of this one of my
grandparents which has printed
absolutely fantastic.
I'm going to show you some of the
limitations of the AI program. And I
believe this could be partially down to
the resolution of the scanned images and
the quality of my old scanner not being
so great. Now, when a lot of these AI
software companies demonstrate how
powerful their tools are, they can use
really high resolution images and that
gives the AI software a lot more
information to work with. But due to the
low resolution of these scans, I did
come across some limitations within the
software. But I think if I had access to
a better scanner or higher resolution
images, I may not encounter those
problems. It's taken me quite a while to
select all the creases in this photo
using the brush tool cuz it was quite
badly damaged. Let's have a look at how
AIT deals with restoring it. You can see
here it's done a pretty good job of
removing the majority of the creases in
the photo. However, if we zoom in and
look at the faces, because there was
quite a large crease across one of the
faces, the face restoration has
struggled with this one ever so
slightly, which is a bit of a shame. But
maybe this photo was just too badly
damaged in the wrong places to be fully
restored. Unfortunately, this photo when
it was originally shot was just way too
out of focus to be restored. I did try
it with the real photo processing model,
the more detail processing model,
and even the AI smooth processing model.
Finally, let's take a look at this
image, which is quite badly faded and
also has quite a dramatic color shift
towards magenta. While the AI model for
more detail and the face restoration
feature did work really well on this
image, unfortunately the photograph was
just a little too far faded and the
color shift was a little too dramatic
for me to be able to fully restore this
image inside AIT.
However, saying that because of the
detail restoration and also the ability
to upscale this image, I would be able
to export it and then import it into a
photo editing software such as Adobe
Lightroom where I would have more tools
and features to be able to color correct
this image. So, as you can see, the
quality of the results does depend on
the quality of the starting image. With
access to a higher quality scanner that
would provide you better quality and
higher resolution images, I'm sure you'd
get significantly better results. But
I'm really pleased with the prints that
I've managed to achieve from my old very
bog standard flatbed scanner. If you'd
like to get yourself a little bit of
discount from AI Artis image enhancer,
use the link in the video description.
I'm going to finish off this video by
taking the prints that I've made to my
parents' house to show my family. So,
stick about for their reaction and I'll
see you in the next one.
>> A good
>> That's that detail is brilliant compared
to the size of that because it's
enlarged so much. Then we can see a lot
more
That's great.
>> Well, I'm a speechless. I I just can't.
>> That's better than what I expected.
>> That's lovely, isn't it?
>> Yeah. And she hasn't altered whereas I
have seen some films what the uh films
do change. But that to me
is uh brilliant.
I think I'd like to film that even
though my own frowning a bit.
Can you both hold them up for the
camera?
>> I I think that's good. And the little
one.
>> Yeah. Just do the little ones up as well
to see the size difference.
>> Yeah. And obviously Yeah, you can keep
them in frame.
>> Let's have a look, Judith.
>> Oh, that is good, isn't it?
>> Yeah. To see how old the photographs
are.
>> Yeah. What do you think?
>> Oh, yeah. Because um
>> What's she carrying?
>> A towel. I think towel,
>> I think. Yeah,
>> towel. Probably going, you know.
>> Yeah. Very impressed.
>> It's great. If they look they look
really young there. Well, they were
young, weren't they?
>> Yeah. Um my mom would be.
>> But my sister's uh grandchildren will
love that photograph.
>> Yeah. I'm really pleased with that.