Restoring old family photos can be an enjoyable time-sink, but an impressive new Photoshop tool has just arrived to speed up the task for those who’d rather do it in a single click.
Photoshop’s new Photo Restoration Neural Filter effectively automates a lot of the program’s tools, like Content-Aware Fill, to help restore your old photos in a few seconds.
‘Neural Filters’ are the collective name for Adobe’s AI-powered editing tools, which also include effects like ‘Depth Blur’ (for artificially creating shallow depth-of-field effects) and ‘Colorize’, which colorizes black-and-white photos.
But the new ‘Photo Restoration’ tool looks particularly handy if you’ve recently digitized a bunch of dog-eared portrait photos. As you can see in the demo below, it can detect and fix scratches, while also working its magic on the contrast, noise and color in the image.
All of these things are already possible in Photoshop, but the leap forward is the ability for the program to spot a photo’s issues and automatically fix them for you. This opens up photo restoration to those who don’t know Photoshop’s often arcane menus.
Because most of Photoshop’s Neural Filters run locally on your computer, though, you’ll need a relatively recent machine to use ‘Photo Restoration’ and those other tricks. Adobe says you need either a Mac running macOS 10.15 Catalina (or later), or a Windows computer running Windows 10 (or later) to use its neural filters.
Adobe hasn’t said exactly when the the ‘Photo Restoration’ filter will be available to download, but we’ve asked it for an estimate and will update this story when we hear back. When Photoshop updates are available, it usually requests that you update your filters – so look out for a nudge from the program soon.
Analysis: Robot Photoshop is learning fast
Photoshop’s ‘neural filters’ only arrived in 2020, but these AI-powered tools have already grown significantly in both number and versatility. This new ‘Photo Restoration’ tool, though, might be one of its most useful ones yet.
It isn’t the first program to tackle the growing demand for digitizing old snaps. Google’s PhotoScan app lets Android and iOS smartphone users bring prints into their digital library, and does automated fixes like removing glare. There are other cloud-based services around too, like VanceAI.
But the power of the Photoshop brand and its ubiquity means its photo restoration tool has a good chance of being used more widely, particularly among beginners who aren’t familiar with its tools. The only downside is that you need full Photoshop in order to use the feature.
If you don’t want the program to be too heavy-handed with your photo, there are adjustment sliders and check boxes (for things like ‘enhance face’ and ‘scratch reduction’ for you to customize the look.
This is good news because, while the Photoshop ‘Photo Restoration’ demos are impressive, some may find the finished result to be a little too bold and artificial. Still, there’s no doubt the feature will improve with time, and it’s just the start of a new ‘robot’ Photoshop for those who don’t know their Curves from their Smart Objects.