Scratch & Tear Repair

Some prints are in good shape apart from one injury. The tonality is fine, the faces are sharp, the color is what it was, and then there is a tear across the corner or a white crease line where the emulsion cracked along a fold. This tool is for that print. It concentrates on the physical damage and leaves everything else as it is: the grain stays, the contrast stays, the slight warmth of the paper stays. What was underneath the scratch or the tear is rebuilt from the surrounding image so that the repair reads as part of the original print rather than a patch laid over it. It suits prints from every decade, from a cracked cabinet card to a creased 1990s snapshot.

The Damage type select narrows the AI's attention. Scratches covers hairline lines and emulsion scuffs, the kind left by a print sliding around a drawer for forty years. Tears and creases handles folds and the pale lines that appear where a print was bent. Water stains is for tide marks and blotches. Mold and foxing is for mildew patches and the brown freckling that appears on older paper. Cracked emulsion is for the crazed, flaking surface of prints that dried out badly, and Tape & glue for the sticky marks that album pages and old repairs leave behind. Everything lets the AI address whatever it finds. The notes box is for pointing at the damage, for example a tear through the top right corner, which helps when the mark is small or sits in a busy area.

One thing worth knowing about a tear: the two halves of the print rarely line up when they are scanned, so scan or photograph the print with the pieces pushed together as closely as you can. Where a piece is missing altogether, the Missing Parts Filler is the better tool, because it is built to continue the scene. Results come back in seconds at the size and shape of your upload, and you can chain straight into fading correction or sharpening afterwards. Because the tool leaves tone alone, a print that comes back repaired will still carry its original warmth or its original fade, which is deliberate: the decision about color is yours to make afterwards, once the physical damage is out of the way and you can see the picture clearly.