How to Restore an Old Scanned Photo with Topaz Photo AI

Combine Topaz Photo AI's Recover Faces, denoise, and sharpen models to bring a faded family scan back to life.

9 minIntermediate

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Old prints pick up grain, soft focus, and washed-out faces, and a flatbed scan often makes all of that worse. Topaz Photo AI bundles several models that target each problem, but the order you enable them and the strength you choose matter. This guide restores a single scanned portrait the right way.

What you need

Topaz Photo AI installed (Windows or macOS desktop app)
A scanned photo at the highest resolution your scanner offers (600 dpi is plenty)
A valid license, since exports are watermarked on trial in some versions
Optional: the original print nearby to compare tones

Step 1: Open the scan and let autopilot run

Drag the scan into Topaz Photo AI. Autopilot inspects the image and proposes a stack of enabled filters. Treat its choices as a starting point only, because autopilot tends to under-correct heavy grain and over-sharpen soft prints.

Step 2: Turn on Recover Faces before anything else

In the right panel, find the Face Recovery section and make sure it is enabled for each detected face. Topaz only repairs faces it has detected, so if a face is missed, click the manual face-selection option and draw a box around it. This step is what brings back recognizable features.

Topaz Photo AI - Edit

Filters

[x] Remove Noise Strength 6

[x] Sharpen Strength 4

[x] Recover Faces

Face 1 (left) Strength 70

Face 2 (right) Strength 65

[ ] Upscale 2x

Each detected face gets its own strength slider.

Step 3: Denoise before you sharpen

Set Remove Noise to a moderate strength first. If you sharpen a grainy image, you sharpen the grain too. Use the loupe in the corner to confirm the grain is gone but skin still has texture, then move on to sharpening with a low strength of 3 to 5.

Do not stack Upscale unless you need pixels

Enabling Upscale on top of Recover Faces can double-process the face and make it look waxy. Only turn on Upscale if the final use genuinely needs more resolution, and keep Face Recovery strength below 75 when you do.

Step 4: Export a lossless copy

Use the command-line or the Export dialog to save as TIFF or maximum-quality PNG so you keep the restored detail. Saving back to JPEG at default quality throws away some of the work you just did.

zsh - export check

confirm the export landed and is full resolution

$sips -g pixelWidth -g pixelHeight grandma_restored.tiff

pixelWidth: 3000

pixelHeight: 4200

TIFF keeps every bit of the restoration, unlike a re-saved JPEG

Result: a once-blurry 1950s portrait now shows defined eyes and a recognizable smile, the film grain is replaced by smooth but natural skin, and the file is a clean TIFF ready to reprint.