How to Restore and Colorize Old Photos with AI

Before and after: what one tap does

Both photos below went through Colorize & Restore once, with nothing retouched afterward. Drag across a picture to compare the two versions.

BeforeAfter

BeforeAfter

The old photos are AI-generated examples of damaged prints, so no real family's pictures are shown. The restored versions are what Colorize & Restore returned on the PRO chat model, unretouched - and so are the Fix Imperfections and follow-up results further down.

What AI restoration can and cannot do

AI restoration is not a filter laid over the picture. The model looks at the whole photo, works out what the damage hides, and paints a clean version of it. That is why it can mend a tear that runs through a sleeve or a cheek - and why you should look closely at the result before you treat it as the photo.

What it repairs well

• Scratches, cracks and tears, including ones across a face
• Creases, folds and water or tape stains
• Dust, spots and heavy film grain
• Faded, washed-out and yellowed tones
• Softness from age, or from a copy of a copy
• Missing color in black-and-white, sepia and faded color prints

Where it has to guess

• Missing pieces. A torn-off corner, or a face lost under a stain, is reconstructed rather than recovered: the model paints what is plausible, not what was there.
• Color. Black-and-white film recorded brightness, not hue, so every colorization is an educated guess - more on that below.
• Small faces and writing. The faces at the back of a group shot, and handwriting or printed captions, can come back altered. Image models are unreliable at lettering.

So treat the result as a restored copy, and keep the original print and your scan.

Step 1: Digitize the photo

The model works with what it receives, and PictorAI sends your photo at close to its original resolution. A sharp, evenly lit copy without glare is the part of the result that is entirely up to you.

With a scanner

A flatbed scanner gives the most faithful copy. Scan at 600 dpi - 300 dpi is plenty for prints larger than about 8 × 10 inches - and scan in color even when the photo is black and white: the color of a stain or of yellowed paper helps tell the damage from the picture. Save it as a JPEG at the highest quality, or as a PNG, and keep that file. It is your archive copy.

With an iPhone

No scanner? A recent iPhone does the job:

• Take the print out of its frame or sleeve if it slides out easily. Never force a photo that is stuck to glass or to an album page - photograph it where it is.
• Brush the dust off with a soft brush or a microfiber cloth. No water, no cleaning products.
• Lay it on a flat, dark surface near a window, in daylight but out of direct sun, and turn the flash off: on a glossy print it leaves a bright hotspot.
• Hold the phone flat above the print, so its edges stay square. If your shadow falls on it, step back and zoom to 2×.
• Look for reflections before you shoot, and tilt the print a little until they are gone.
• Tap a face to focus, take two or three shots and keep the sharpest.
• Crop away the table and everything else around the print.

Step 2: Restore and colorize in one tap

1. Install PictorAI from the App Store. It is free and runs on iPhone and iPad with iOS 17.1 or later and on the Mac with macOS 15 or later. The app opens without an account; the first time you restore a photo it asks you to sign in with Apple or with email, so your coins and your history follow you to your other devices.
2. Open the AI Chat tab, tap Upload Image and choose the photo. On a Mac or an iPad you can also drag the file into the chat.
3. Under Quick Actions, tap Colorize & Restore.
4. A few seconds later the restored photo arrives as a reply in the chat.

Behind the button is a written instruction to the model: repair scratches, tears, creases, stains, dust and film grain, reduce fading and recover sharpness; if the photo is black and white, sepia or faded, add natural color that fits its period; keep the composition and every person's facial features exactly as they are; add nothing and remove nothing. You can type the request yourself - 'restore this old photo and bring back its colors' - but the button saves the typing and costs the same.

Fast or PRO?

Before the first message of a chat, a picker above the text field offers two models. Fast (Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Image, or Nano Banana 2 Lite) is open to everyone. PRO (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image, or Nano Banana 2) comes with the PRO and MAX subscriptions and is their default: it keeps faces and fine detail better, and it made every example in this guide. A reply costs the same on either - 1 coin, or one generation from the daily allowance.

Restore without colorizing

Plenty of old photos look right in black and white, and not every family wants to see Grandma in colors she may never have worn. For those, tap Fix Imperfections instead of Colorize & Restore. It removes spots, scratches, dust and other damage without changing what is in the picture, so the tones stay as they were.

BeforeAfter

Results vary from one try to the next: in the other of our two tries on this print, Fix Imperfections left the torn-off corner as it was. If a tear or a stain survives, name it in your next message - 'repair the torn corner at the top right'.

You can also put it in your own words: 'repair the scratches and the stains, keep it black and white'. Two more tools sit under More... beside the Quick Actions: Sharpen Details for a blurry scan, and Color Correction for a color print whose colors have drifted, like the orange or magenta cast of a print from the 1970s.

Step 3: Refine the result in the chat

The first result is a starting point. Reply in the same chat and the next version comes back as another reply. The chat remembers the previous one, so 'a little warmer' means warmer than the last result, not than the original - and the earlier versions stay in the conversation.

Messages that work well:

• Make the colors more muted, like a print from the 1960s.
• Her dress was navy blue. Keep everything else the same.
• Remove the white crease across his forehead.
• Keep the faces exactly as in the original.
• Less smoothing on the skin - keep the film grain.
• Repair the torn corner at the top right.

Three habits make most of the difference:

• One change per message. Ask for three at once and the result starts to drift - and each reply costs the same either way.
• Name the thing and the place. 'Remove the stain on his left shoulder' works; 'clean it up' often changes nothing.
• Say what has to stay. 'Do not change the faces' is an instruction too, and the model takes it as one.

When the result is not right

• A face looks different. Reply 'keep the face exactly as in the original', start again from a sharper copy of the print, and use the PRO model if you have it - it holds a likeness better.
• The colors look too bright or too modern. Ask for 'muted, natural colors, like a photo from the 1950s'.
• Something was added or removed. Name it, and add 'do not add or remove anything'.
• The request was refused. Google's image models block some requests outright. Rephrasing usually helps, and in AI Chat a blocked request is refunded like any other error.

How to get the colors right

A black-and-white photo records how light or dark each thing was, not its color: a red dress and a green one can come out the same gray. So every colorization - by an AI or by a person with a brush - is an informed guess. The model chooses colors that are plausible for the period. Skin, sky and foliage come out close to life, because their colors vary little; hair, clothes, cars and painted walls could have been any color, and that is where it guesses.

In the family photo above, the first result painted the car maroon. If you know it was pale blue, say so:

First resultOne reply later

• Tell it what you know. The color of a uniform, a car, a front door, a dress still in the wardrobe - one sentence each, one message at a time.
• Give the decade and the place. 'Colorize naturally for a photo taken in Naples in the 1950s' nudges the palette toward the period.
• Ask the family. Relatives often remember colors that no photo kept.
• Say it is colorized. When you share the result, mention it: a colorized photo is an interpretation, not a record.

Step 4: Save it and keep the original

Tap the save button beside a result to put it in your Photos library. On the Mac, click the result to open it in a window of its own, where ⌘S saves it as a file and ⇧⌘S sends it to Photos - or drag it straight out to Finder. The conversation stays in AI Chat, so you can come back days later and ask for one more change, on any of your devices.

Restored photos come back at 1K resolution: sharp on a phone, a tablet or a TV, and enough for sharing and small prints. They do not replace a high-resolution scan, so keep all three - the original print, stored flat and away from light and damp; your scan or photo of it; and the restored version. And add a caption in Photos with the names, the place and the year while someone still remembers them.

Restoring a whole album

• Start a New chat for every photo, so the instructions for one picture do not carry over to the next.
• Find the wording on one photo first, then reuse it for the rest of the album: the same decade, the same known colors.
• On a Mac, drag the scans in from Finder and work in two panes, the latest result beside the conversation. ⌘N starts a new chat.

What it costs

• Installing is free, and so is looking around: the app opens without an account.
• 1 coin per reply. Colorize & Restore, Fix Imperfections and every follow-up message that brings back an image cost the same.
• Free coins. Open the app on consecutive days and the daily bonus pays 2, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15 and 25 coins - up to 62 a week, enough for 62 restorations. Sharing the app once adds 30.
• PRO and MAX. PRO includes 25 generations a day and the PRO chat model, MAX includes 50; past the allowance, subscribers spend coins. The weekly PRO plan starts with a 3-day free trial and 25 bonus coins.
• Errors are refunded. If a restore fails with an error, the coin or the generation comes back automatically and the chat says you weren't charged; cancelling a request refunds it too. A reply in words instead of an image - when the model explains why it can't make a change - counts as an attempt.

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