How to Restore Old Photos: Fix Dust, Scratches and Date Stamps

To restore an old photo, scan it at the right resolution, remove loose dust before you scan, then erase the remaining specks, scratches, creases and date stamps in small passes with an inpainting tool, and correct faded color separately with levels or white balance. Inpainting handles marks on top of the picture. It cannot bring back detail that was never captured, and it does not fix color shifts.

This guide walks through scanning settings, what each kind of damage needs, and the order of steps that gives the cleanest result.

What "restoring" an old photo actually involves

Old photo damage falls into three groups, and each needs a different fix. Physical marks (dust, scratches, creases, tears, stamps) cover part of the image. Chemical changes (fading, yellowing, color casts) alter the whole image. Missing detail (blur, a torn-off corner, a face lost to a water stain) is information that no longer exists.

• Physical marks are what an eraser or healing tool is for. The tool removes the mark and fills the gap with texture from around it.
• Chemical changes are fixed with tone and color controls: levels, curves, white balance, saturation.
• Missing detail can only be guessed. Some tools generate a plausible face or corner, but it is an invention, not a recovery.

Knowing which group a problem belongs to saves time. People often spend an hour erasing a red cast pixel by pixel, when one click of auto color would have fixed it.

Step 1: Scan at the right resolution

Scan prints at 300 dpi for a same-size copy and 400–600 dpi if you plan to enlarge or crop, and scan film at 2,000 dpi or more. Those numbers come from two public sources:

• The Library of Congress scanning handout for personal collections recommends 300 dpi for 4x6 and 5x7 prints, and 400 or 600 dpi if you want to enlarge them to 8x10 or bigger. It suggests around 1,900 dpi for slides.
• The FADGI Technical Guidelines (third edition, 2023), used by US federal archives, set four quality levels. For prints and photographs the levels are 200, 250, 400 and 600 ppi. For 35 mm negatives and transparencies up to 4x5 inches they are 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 and 4,000 ppi.

The logic is simple: the scan needs enough pixels for the largest print you will ever make. A print at 300 pixels per inch looks sharp at reading distance, so a 10-inch-wide print needs 3,000 pixels across. If the original is 6 inches wide, that means scanning at 500 dpi, which rounds up to 600.

A few more settings matter as much as resolution:

1. Save a lossless master. FADGI lists TIFF and JPEG 2000 as master formats. Save the scan as TIFF, then make JPEG copies for sharing.
2. Scan black-and-white prints in color or 16-bit grayscale if your scanner allows it. You keep the warm tone of the paper and more room for contrast adjustments.
3. Turn off the scanner's built-in sharpening and "descreen" for photos. You can sharpen later; you cannot undo it.
4. Scan negatives with a film holder, not flat on the glass, to avoid Newton rings (rainbow ripples where film touches glass).

Infrared dust removal on film scanners

Many film scanners include an infrared dust and scratch channel, sold under names like Digital ICE. It detects dust because dust blocks infrared light while color dyes do not. It works on color negatives and most color slides. According to the Digital ICE article on Wikipedia, it does not work on traditional silver black-and-white film, because silver grains block infrared just like dust, and older scanners struggle with Kodachrome. For those, turn it off and clean up afterwards.

Step 2: Remove dust before you scan

The fastest dust spot to fix is the one you blow off before scanning. Clean the scanner glass, then use a soft brush or a hand air blower on the photo or film. The Library of Congress handout also says to remove paper clips, staples and tape where you can do so without damaging the item.

Avoid liquids, tissues and cloths on the emulsion (the shiny side of a print, the dull side of film). If a print is stuck to glass or badly flaking, stop and ask a conservator; scanning it as-is is safer than trying to free it.

Step 3: Erase dust, scratches, creases and date stamps

After scanning, erase marks one area at a time, smallest first, with a tool that fills each area from its surroundings. This is called inpainting. You paint over the mark, the tool removes those pixels, and a model predicts what should be there from the texture around the hole.

Here is the order that works best:

1. Make a working copy of the master scan. Never edit the master.
2. Crop off scanner borders and any torn edges you do not want to rebuild.
3. Clear dust and specks in the open areas first: sky, walls, background, clothing. These are quick wins and make the rest easier to see.
4. Erase thin scratches with a brush a little wider than the scratch. Follow the line in short strokes rather than one long one.
5. Erase the date stamp. Those orange digits from 1980s and 1990s cameras usually sit in a bottom corner over grass, floor or sky, and they vanish in one or two passes.
6. Handle creases. A crease is a long bright line where the emulsion cracked. Over plain areas, erase it in segments. Where it crosses a face, do the face last and in very small pieces.
7. Zoom out and compare with the original at 100% size. Look for smudged patches or repeated texture, and undo anything that looks worse than the damage.

If you use WipeMark's eraser, you paint over the mark or draw a box around it. Only the area around the mark, at most 1,024 pixels, is sent to the server, where the LaMa model fills it. The patch is then pasted back into your full-size scan in your browser, and you can erase again on the result. Each pass usually takes a few seconds.

What inpainting can and can't fix

Inpainting is very good at continuing texture and weak at inventing structure. The model behind many erasers, including WipeMark's, is LaMa (Suvorov et al., WACV 2022). Its authors trained it at 256x256 pixels and report that it generalizes well to images around 2,000 pixels, according to the LaMa repository. It uses fast Fourier convolutions, which let it look at the whole image at once, so it handles repeating patterns like brick, grass and fabric well.

For damage across a face, think about whether a perfect fix is needed at all. A small scar on an otherwise clear face may look more honest than an invented eye. If the face matters, a skilled human retoucher working from other photos of the same person will beat any automatic fill.

Fixing faded and color-shifted photos

Faded color comes from dyes breaking down, so fix it with color tools, not an eraser. Color film and prints form the image from three dyes (cyan, magenta and yellow), and the Image Permanence Institute's guide to dye fading notes that "color dyes fade unevenly, resulting in distracting shifts in color balance." Its example: on Eastmancolor film from 1950 to 1981, the cyan and yellow dyes fade faster than magenta, leaving a magenta cast. That uneven loss is why so many old snapshots drift toward red, orange or pink. Heat and humidity speed it up, which is why prints kept in attics fade worse than ones kept in a cool room.

A practical sequence in any photo editor:

1. Auto levels or auto color first. It stretches each channel to full range and often removes most of the cast.
2. White balance with an eyedropper on something that should be neutral, like a white shirt or grey pavement.
3. Curves per channel if a cast remains in the shadows or highlights only.
4. Saturation up a little, because faded dyes also lose intensity.

Do this after erasing, so the eraser works on the same colors you see, or before, if the cast makes it hard to spot dust. Either order works; just do the color fix once, at the end of a session, not repeatedly.

A complete restoration checklist

Here is the whole process in one list, from print to finished file:

1. Clean the scanner glass and blow loose dust off the photo.
2. Scan at 300 dpi (same size) or 600 dpi (enlarge) for prints, 2,000–4,000 dpi for film.
3. Save the scan as a TIFF master and keep it untouched.
4. Make a working copy and crop the borders.
5. Erase specks, then scratches, then the date stamp, then creases, in small passes.
6. Leave serious damage across faces for last, or for a human retoucher.
7. Fix fading with levels, white balance and curves.
8. Export a JPEG or PNG for sharing and printing, and name it with the date and people in it.
9. Keep at least two copies in different places, as the Library of Congress handout recommends.

If your scan is very large, note that many web editors cap the size they will open. WipeMark accepts JPG, PNG, WebP and HEIC up to 25 megapixels; a 4x6 print at 600 dpi is about 8.6 megapixels, well within that, while a 35 mm negative at 4,000 dpi is about 21.

Related guides

If you want to cut a person out of an old group photo or put them on a clean background, see how to remove the background from a photo. For removing a stranger or object rather than damage, the same inpainting rules apply, covered in how to remove people from a photo. And if you are curious how these models work under the hood, read how AI background removal works.

One last note on whose photos you restore: family prints are usually fine to clean up for your own album, but a studio's name stamped on a portrait is a credit, not damage. See what you can and cannot erase before removing it from anything you plan to publish.