What a scratch looks like to the finder
A scratch on a print is a thin line that is brighter than everything on either side of it — the emulsion is gone and the white paper shows through. On a scanned negative it is the opposite: a thin dark line. Either way it is a ridge in brightness: sharp across, nearly flat along. Find scratches measures exactly that at two scales, keeps only the centre line of each ridge so it cannot bleed into the picture around it, and grows the strong parts into whole lines. Each candidate then has to prove it is a line and not the edge of something: it must be long, and the picture on its two sides must agree with each other while both differing from the line itself. The edge of a roof fails that test — dark on one side, bright on the other — and is never proposed.
Nothing is erased until you choose
Candidates appear in amber on the photo and in a list in the panel. Click a line on the photo to select it (it turns green), or press Select all. Old photos contain thin things that belong — a flagpole, a fence wire, a crack in a wall that was really there — and only you can tell those apart from damage. If a scratch was missed, tap on it with the Scratch tool: the tracer snaps to the strongest line near your tap and follows it in both directions, allowing more curvature than the power-line tracer does, because scratches wander.
How the repair keeps the photo looking old
A restored print that looks airbrushed is a failed restoration. Hairline marks — scratches, strands and specks a few pixels wide — are refilled smoothly from both sides and then given back the film grain measured from the print right next to the scratch, so the repair has the same texture as everything around it. Wider marks are rebuilt by copying real texture from nearby. Only areas more than forty pixels wide, such as a large tear, are handed to the AI eraser. Every pixel outside the selected marks is copied through exactly: the picture is not re-sharpened, re-coloured or smoothed anywhere else.
Dust, creases and small tears
Dust specks are not lines, so they are found by the Blemish tool instead: press Find spots and every likely speck is circled, ready to repair in one go, or click each speck to fix it on the spot. For a crease or a small tear, draw round it with the Lasso — the scratch preset gives repairs a wider context, so the texture is matched over a larger area. If one shot of a series has the same dust spot as all the others, Batch can find recurring spots across the whole set.
What this does not do
This page removes dust, scratches, creases and small tears. It does not colourise black-and-white photos, sharpen faces, restore faded colour or enlarge the picture, and it does not claim to. For a faded print, the brightness, contrast and saturation sliders in the editor's Adjust panel help a little; for everything else, keep the original scan safe and work on a copy.
Scanning tips that make the biggest difference
Clean the glass and the print with a soft brush before scanning — every speck you brush off is one you do not have to repair. Scan in colour even for black-and-white prints; the colour channels make dust easier to tell apart from detail. And save the scan losslessly. JPEG compression smears fine scratches into blocky halos that are harder to find and harder to fill. When you are done here, export as PNG for the same reason.