Face Restoration

Faces are what people look at first in an old photograph and what they miss most when they are soft. A small print, a slightly missed focus, a decade of handling, and the eyes become two grey smudges. Face Restoration works on the faces alone. It recovers detail in the eyes, eyebrows, skin texture, lips and hair that was lost to blur, low resolution or damage, and it leaves the rest of the photograph as it was apart from matching the sharpness so that a crisp face does not sit oddly on a soft background. The instructions are firm about identity: same face shape, same features, same expression, same apparent age, no beautifying, no slimming, no de-aging.

The Strength select is the important decision. Natural recovers only what is plausibly already in the print, sharpening features gently and keeping the soft character of the original. This is the right setting for most prints and the one that changes a face least. Strong is for faces that are very blurry or very small, a few dozen pixels across, where the AI has to reconstruct believable facial detail rather than sharpen what exists. It keeps the bone structure and expression it can see, but the fine detail it adds is inferred, and you should think of a Strong result as a plausible reconstruction to compare against other photographs of the person. The notes box lets you say which face matters, for instance the baby on the left, so the AI gives that one the closest attention.

Upload the largest version of the photo you have, since a face that is 200 pixels across gives the AI far more to work from than one that is 40. Results follow the shape of the upload and come back in seconds. After a face pass, the Studio can enlarge the result for reprinting or send it on to the Memorial Portrait tool. A group photo with a dozen faces is handled in the same pass, each face treated on its own terms, though the notes box is the way to say which one deserves the most care when the print will be cropped to a single person later. Faces in profile or half-turned are handled too, with the visible side guiding the reconstruction.