Restore Old Photos Workflows

The photo you want to restore old photos from is usually the one that matters most: a creased portrait of a grandparent, a faded wedding print, a torn snapshot that barely survived a move. You scanned it, and now the scratches, the soft faces, and the washed-out color stare back at you. The ComfyUI workflows on this page treat repair as a series of steps you control rather than a single mystery button.

Restoration is really three jobs, and these workflows let you do each one and stop when the picture looks right. Repair handles physical damage: scratches, tears, creases, and the stains a print picks up over decades. Recovery and sharpening bring faded faces back, pulling detail into eyes, hair, and skin so the person reads as themselves again. Denoise and upscale clean grainy, low-resolution scans and enlarge the frame without smearing. SeedVR2 and Recraft handle crisp upscaling, the FaceGen skin-detail workflow rebuilds soft features, and image-edit models like FireRed Image Edit 1.1, Nano Banana Pro, Topaz, and Reve cover repair and enhancement.

Colorizing a black-and-white photo runs through those same image-edit models. You describe the scene or let the model infer plausible tones, then re-run if a skin tone reads wrong. Because the color pass is separate, you can repair damage first, get a clean grayscale image, and only then add color, which almost always beats doing everything at once.

Be realistic about limits. AI is excellent at faded contrast, light scratches, and grain, and good at faces that still have some structure left. A large tear through a face or heavy water staining forces the model to guess, and a guess can drift toward a generic face that is not quite the person, so run those a few times and expect a little manual touch-up afterward. Every step here is open and editable: you set how hard to push detail, swap the model that suits a given print, and re-run any pass. Work locally in ComfyUI or on Comfy Cloud with no install and no watermark, and you will get far closer to the photo you remember than a one-click app would.