Newspaper & Yearbook Photo Restoration

For a great many families the only surviving picture of someone is a printed one: a wedding notice cut from the local paper, a yearbook portrait, an obituary photograph, a team picture in a club magazine. Those images were never continuous-tone prints. They were made of dots, a halftone screen that tricks the eye at reading distance and falls apart under a scanner, where it turns into a grid and, often, a shimmering moire pattern on top. This tool removes the dots and the moire and rebuilds smooth photographic tones from them, neutralizes the yellowing of the newsprint, takes out the paper texture, and keeps any printed caption legible and unchanged so the names stay with the faces.

The Printed source select tells the AI what kind of screen it is looking at, because they differ. Newspaper means a coarse screen on soft, yellowed newsprint with ink that has spread a little. Yearbook means a finer screen on better paper, usually with a portrait against a plain backdrop. Magazine means a fine screen with slight ink bleed and glossier paper. Photocopy is a different problem altogether: harsh contrast, banding and toner speckle, with the mid-tones already lost, and the AI is told to expect that. The right choice changes how aggressively the dot pattern is treated and how much smooth tone the AI expects to recover between the dots. When you are unsure, Newspaper is the broadest setting and a reasonable first try.

Scan the clipping at a high resolution, 600 dpi if your scanner allows, and do not let the scanner's own descreen setting run first, since two descreening passes tend to leave a softer result than one. Results follow the shape of the upload and come back in seconds. A restored clipping is a good candidate for the Face Restoration tool next, and then for enlargement if you want to frame it. Keep the original scan of the clipping with its caption and date, since the newspaper page is often the only record of when and where the photograph was published, and the restored image will not carry that context on its own. Yearbook portraits from the same page respond well to the same settings, so a whole class can be done in sequence.