How do I restore old photos with ComfyUI workflows?

You start from a high-resolution scan and run it through steps you control: repair damage, recover faces, denoise, upscale, and optionally colorize. Each pass is a separate workflow, so you stop when the photo looks right.

How can I colorize a black and white photo?

Repair the grayscale image first, then send it to an image-edit model like Reve or Topaz and describe the scene or let it infer plausible tones. Because colorizing is a separate pass, you can re-run it whenever a tone reads wrong without redoing the repair.

Can AI recover faces in faded photos?

Yes, the FaceGen skin-detail workflow rebuilds soft, faded faces, pulling detail back into eyes, hair, and skin. It works best when some facial structure survives in the scan. On faces that have lost large areas the result can drift toward a generic look, so run a few passes and pick the most faithful one.

What scan quality do I need to restore faded photos well?

Scan at 300 to 600 DPI and save a lossless PNG rather than a compressed JPG. A higher-quality scan gives the repair and upscaling steps more real detail to work with, which directly improves how well faded photos recover.

Can I run these photo restoration workflows myself?

The workflows are open and editable. You can run them locally in ComfyUI, or on Comfy Cloud with no setup, and there is no watermark on the output you download.

Is AI photo repair as good as a professional restoration service?

For fading, grain, light scratches, and colorizing, AI gets close to professional work in minutes. For severe damage where a service would hand-paint missing detail, AI gives you a strong starting point that may still want cleanup. The advantage here is iterating as much as you want rather than waiting on a turnaround.

Why is it better to repair damage before colorizing?

Colorizing on top of scratches and stains spreads color into the damage and bakes the flaws in. Running repair first gives the color pass a clean grayscale image, so tones land on real detail. Keeping the steps separate also lets you re-run color alone when a tone looks off.

Do I need to install anything to run these workflows?

No. Comfy Cloud opens the repair and upscale workflows in your browser with nothing to install, so you can scan, run, and download from any machine. If you prefer to keep everything local, the same workflows load in a desktop ComfyUI install with your own GPU.

What hardware do I need to run these locally in ComfyUI?

The open-weights pieces like FireRed Image Edit 1.1 and SeedVR2 upscaling run on a recent GPU with roughly 8 to 12 GB of VRAM when you use the GGUF quantized builds, and more VRAM lets you process larger scans in one pass. The API-based models, such as Nano Banana Pro and Reve, run server-side, so those need only a connection rather than a strong local card. Comfy Cloud is a paid plan that runs all of them on rented GPUs starting at $20 per month, while local runs use your own card with no per-image charge.

Use Cases

Restore Old Photos Workflows

Q: Can severely damaged or torn photos be repaired?

Light scratches, grain, and fading restore very well, and faces with some structure left usually come back convincingly. A large tear through a face or heavy water staining is harder, because the model has to guess at missing detail. Run those a few times and expect manual touch-up on the worst spots.

Repair scratches, recover faded faces, denoise scans, and colorize black-and-white prints with open, editable ComfyUI workflows you run pass by pass.

7 workflows

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The workflows

7 Restore Old Photos Workflows

About This Workflow

What is the Restore Old Photos?

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.

Damage repair

Remove scratches, tears, creases, and stains with FireRed Image Edit 1.1 or Nano Banana Pro before any other pass.

Reimagine

Face recovery

Rebuild soft, faded faces with the FaceGen skin-detail workflow so eyes, hair, and skin read as the real person again.

Reproducible, tunable, yours

Every step is exposed and adjustable, and the exact graph is yours to reuse across projects.

Start free. Upgrade when you’re ready.

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Capabilities

What You Can Create

Repair damage, recover faded faces, denoise scans, and colorize prints as separate passes you run and stop at will.

Denoise and upscale

Clean grain from old scans and enlarge low-resolution prints crisply with SeedVR2 and Recraft.

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Colorize black and white

Add natural color to a grayscale print using image-edit models like Reve or Topaz, then re-run any tone that reads wrong.

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Contrast and fade recovery

Pull back washed-out, sun-bleached images so faces and detail return without crushing the highlights.

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HOW

WORKS

Connect models, processing steps, and outputs on a canvas where every decision is visible and every step is inspectable.

Start from a community template or build from scratch.

Comparison

Why Comfy Workflows

Repair pass by pass, not one button

Every node is exposed, so you run damage repair, face recovery, denoise, upscale, and colorize as separate steps and stop the moment the print looks right.
Pick your variant and settings

ONLY ONComfyCLOUD

Swap between open-weights editors like FireRed Image Edit 1.1 and SeedVR2 upscaling or API models like Nano Banana Pro and Reve, and re-run any pass at a different detail strength.
Repair before you colorize

Keeping color as its own pass means you clean scratches and stains first, so tones land on real detail instead of baking flaws in, and you re-run a wrong skin tone alone.
No watermark, run it your way

Process the scan locally in ComfyUI on your own GPU or on Comfy Cloud with no install, and download the result at full resolution with no watermark and no per-image charge.

Applications

What people use it for

The repairs people run most on creased, faded, and black-and-white scans.

Restore Old Photos FAQ

Related models and use cases to try next.

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Restore Old Photos Workflows

7 Restore Old Photos Workflows

Restore Old Photos

Seedream 5.0 Pro: Image Edit

Topaz: Image Enhance

Image Relight

Topaz: Illustration Upscale

Magnific: Creative Image Upscale

WaveSpeed: Image Upscale