Restore and engrave old photographs

How it works

Working a damaged print

Start with the best original you can get. Scan the print rather than photographing it, at 600 DPI or more, and save as PNG or TIFF; JPEG block artifacts survive every later step and show up as visible marks in the engraving. In Photo Studio, do the manual work first. Levels: black point up, white point down, midtone gamma to open the face. Sharpness after that, and sparingly. A surprising number of unusable scans are just badly set levels. Then the AI. Type what you want fixed, such as repair the crease across the shoulder and remove the water spots, or press the Repair chip, and generate with PHOTON v1.1. If PHOTON keeps missing, WAVELENGTH v1.2 on paid plans is the one to escalate to. Press Work From Here to bake a result you like, so the next edit builds on it.

Getting a restored portrait to engrave

A restored photo and an engraving-ready photo are not the same file. Engraving throws away most of the tonal range you just recovered, so the question becomes where the remaining separation should go, and the answer is almost always the face. Run Remove Background last. A PHOTON edit can bring back a background you already removed, so the order matters; WAVELENGTH does not re-introduce it, if you are on a paid plan. A clean silhouette is what makes a portrait sit on the material instead of floating in a grey rectangle. From there, pick the output. Export a PNG for flat photo engraving. Send to Embossing Studio for a variable-depth relief. Or Send to Mesh Studio, choose 2.5D and Persona v1, which is built for photographs of people and will produce a broken result on anything else, then continue into Crystal Studio.

Restoration, not resurrection

This is the part to be straight with customers about. The AI does not recover information that is missing from the scan; it generates a plausible version of what was probably there. On a 1940s portrait with a crease through the jaw, what comes back is an invention that happens to look right. For memorial work that is a real risk. Keep the original open beside the restored version, and show the family before you engrave. A relative will notice a subtly changed mouth or a wrong hairline even when they cannot say why. The chips make it easy to go too far. Smile alters someone's expression. Colorize assigns colours nobody alive can confirm. Pixar Style and Anime Style are there for gifts, not for grave markers. Keep the touch light on memorial pieces and save the dramatic edits for the fun ones.

Frequently asked questions

Can it recover detail that is not in the original scan?

No. It produces a plausible reconstruction, not recovered information; a repaired cheek is the model's best guess at what was there. That is often exactly what you want, and sometimes it is not. Scan the best original you can find at high resolution, keep it, and compare the two side by side before committing anything to a memorial piece.

Should I remove the background before or after an AI edit?

After. A PHOTON v1.1 edit can bring back a background you already removed, so if you take it out first you may find it has quietly returned. Make Remove Background your last step. WAVELENGTH v1.2, on paid plans, does not re-introduce a removed background, so it is the safer choice when you need to keep iterating on a cut-out subject.

Is it worth colorizing a black-and-white photo before engraving?

Usually not for its own sake, since a single-tone engraving discards colour anyway. What colorizing does change is the tonal relationships, so it can either separate two areas that were the same grey or flatten contrast you needed. If you try it, compare the colorized and original versions side by side and keep whichever gives the face better midtone separation.