Top 8 Best Software to Restore Old Photos in 2025
Try our picked solutions to promptly restore your old photos
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Looking to bring life & restore old photos? You’re in the right place.
Today we’ll walk you through the best tools that can help you remove stains, improve clarity, colorize, and offer other similar features that can turn back the clock on your pictures.
What is the best software for restoring old photos?
Adobe Photoshop CC – Cross-platform compatibility
Adobe Photoshop CC is a well-acknowledged photo editing software that is used both by beginners and professionals.
It is one of the most suitable software tools to restore old images that are damaged by either scratch, color degradation, or come with the well-known sepia hue.
The main reason why we chose Photoshop CC as the best option is the ability to work on multiple layers, adjust highlights, and shadows, and change RGB colors down to the pixel level.
Apart from restoring old images, you can also work on improving the quality of images by changing skin tone, applying filters, or removing backgrounds.
Let’s quickly look at its key features:
- Professional photo editing toolkit (crop, retouch, restore, repair, and combine photos)
- Unlimited layers, masks, and effects for stunning imagery
- Cross-platform compatibility and full support for stylus or touch technology
- Your projects are automatically saved to the cloud
- Interactive in-app tutorials and inspirational content available
Adobe Photoshop
Restore your most precious memories to their former glory with this great photo restoration software!Luminar – Color temperature feature
Restoring old photos is no easy task… or is it? It can be with the right tools and Luminar delivers everything you need to remove noise, retouch black-and-white pictures, and adjust tones, clarity, and contrast.
Using AI-based image processing and powerful noise reduction tools, Luminar helps you bring your old photos back to their sharp and crisp state.
This software comes with a full set of old photo restoration tools to remove stains, scratches, splotches, and dirt.
Let’s quickly look at its key features:
- Automated AI-based photo editor
- Professional-grade noise reduction tools
- Erase tool to cover problematic areas with similar-looking textures
- Enhance faded photos by fixing contrast, tone, exposure, and color
- Color Temperature filter to cool down the temperature of your photos
Luminar
An AI-based app that offers you a full set of features to edit your old photos.Fotor – Intuitive app
While it is not as feature-rich a software as Adobe Photoshop, for instance, Fotor does a pretty good job at photo restoration.
What’s more, it delivers a complete photo editing toolkit for free.
Fotor’s main focuses are on color correction and RAW image editing, which makes it perfectly suited to adjust balance and enhance faded colors and shades in old photos.
Let’s quickly look at its key features:
- Supports all popular graphic file formats
- In-built photo restoration feature
- Photo editing tools (crop, add or remove objects, bur, adjust contrast, correct color and shade, and more)
- Intuitive, easy-to-use interface
Fotor
Restore your old photos and benefit from all of Fotor’s amazing features.Corel Paintshop Pro – Customizable interface
Corel Paintshop Pro is another great tool to restore photos.
With the Fade correction feature, you can adjust the percentage of tint and fade to your liking without the need for complex photo editing skills.
One of the other advantages it has is the scratch remover that can easily handle scratches on damaged photos. It allows you to select a damaged area and then apply a layer of paint over it.
With the Cutout Lab feature, you can easily remove the background of the photo while preserving the quality on the edges.
Let’s quickly look at its key features:
- Customizable interface
- Stylus and tablet support
- 360 photo editing
- HDR photo manipulation
- Creative content integration
Corel PaintShop Pro
Breathe life into your old photos and enjoy forever-lasting memories with Corel PaintShop Pro right away!PhotoWorks – Impressive AI features
Another great entry in our list of reliable photo-restoring tools is PhotoWorks, a user-friendly software solution that will soon become your most trusted photo assistant.
The Healing Brush that you will find in the Retouch tab will help you get rid of small cracks from old photos.
If you choose the right brush size, they will disappear like magic. After you adjust the Feather and Opacity settings for softening the areas that have been touched and the rest of the photo, you are done.
Of course, you can still work on the details and enliven the colors or even replace the background if it’s too damaged, but everything is extremely easy to work with.
Let’s quickly look at its key features:
- Impressive AI features
- Remove glare and smooth textural inconsistencies with Portrait Magic
- Photo quality enhancements
- Work with each color on the photo one by one
- One-click effects
PhotoWorks
Revive your old photos with this great tool that helps you preserve your memories and heritage.PhotoGlory – Stylized text labels
If you want a powerful photo restoration software tool, PhotoGlory is worthy of your full attention. There is no other option on the market to remove scratches, tears, and stains so easily.
Moreover, when your mission is to bring life to old photos, another useful trick is to colorize them. Don’t even think that you need to find a different tool for that.
A click is all that stays between you and achieving this goal as well. You can even modify the colors manually in order to make the results more personal.
Thanks to the latest built-in technology, all your edits will be precise, smooth, and will look natural even with automatic effects.
Key features that PhotoGlory brings to the table:
- Restores colors to faded photos
- Ads stylized text labels and date stamps
- Removes scratches, stains, and creases
- Assembles photos ripped in half
- Turns a negative picture into positive
PhotoGlory
Give a new life to your old photos with PhotoGlory! Your loved ones will most likely be surprised.AKVIS Retoucher – Intelligent cloning techniques
AKVIS Retoucher is a photo restoration software that helps to remove dust, scratches, and other unwanted objects as well as restructure missing parts.
By removing unwanted details, this software helps to improve photo composition. Since it’s a Photoshop-compatible plugin, it works well with a selection of your Photoshop image editors.
Besides the plugin version, AKVIS Retoucher is available as an independent program (standalone) with a trial version.
There is no registration required to try all the features of the software during the free 10-day evaluation period.
Let’s quickly look at its key features:
- Intelligent cloning techniques to cover the selected areas and yield amazing results in removing photo defects
- Resolves the problem of extending the borders of a layout that does not have space for cropping
- Photo restoration tools
- It also removes the date stamp, and distracting details, and increases the image canvas using the image patterns to fill blank areas
Akvis Retoucher
AKVIS Retoucher will help you give a new life to your old, dusty photos by also improving their composition.SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher – Content-filling algorithms
SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher enables you to clean digital album photos, removing any imperfections to create a perfect picture.
This program not only allows you to remove minor imperfections scratches but also causes major objects or people to vanish.
This is made possible by the content-filling algorithms that let you reproduce the original background behind the erased objects.
You can also use SoftOrbits to remove scratches, cracks, dust, stains, and other imperfections.
Let’s review some of its best features:
- Remove unwanted elements from the image
- Eliminate scratches, cracks, dust, stains, and more
- Content-filling algorithms to fill out any voids
- Great set of tools
- Intuitive interface
SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher
SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher can help you not only to fix your old photos but also to quickly remove objects from them.How to restore old damaged photos
- Old color photos often fade due to unreliable dyes. To restore them, use dedicated photo restoration software, which repairs damage and revives colors. These apps can remove scratches, creases, and sun damage without altering the originals.
- Black-and-white photo restoration tools are particularly useful for rejuvenating faded photos, making them look new again by removing stains and other imperfections.
Summary
We’ve listed some of the renowned old photo restoration software that can assist you in cleaning up all your old photos.
However, don’t hesitate to take a look at our free photo editing apps list and you will also find more interesting tools to try.
We hope you found this article useful and informative. Feel free to comment and share.
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