Use This Free Tool to Restore Faces on Old Family Photos
Since its invention in 1826 , modern photography has been constantly evolving. But technology aside, the fact that we have the ability to look at real images (as opposed to illustrations or painted portraits) of people’s faces almost 200 years ago is quite remarkable.
This is especially true when it comes to our own family photos. Whether the earliest staged studio portraits you have or more modern, candid images, it can be hard to make out some faces from previous generations. Luckily, there is an online tool that can help. Even better, it’s free. Here’s what you need to know.
How to use a free online photo recovery tool
This online tool called GFPGAN first came under our radar when it was featured in the August 28th edition of the (excellent) Recomendo newsletter , specifically in a post by Kevin Kelly. In it, he says he uses the free software to restore his own old family photos, noting that it focuses exclusively on the faces of the people depicted and “works quite well, sometimes perfectly, in color and black and white.”
There are several ways to access the program, as described in this post on ByteXD , but we got to this Baseten web page on Kelly’s recommendation.
The tool is incredibly easy to use. If you access GFPGAN on your phone, you have the option to select a photo from your library or take a new photo to use. When we visited the page from a laptop, the only option was to select a file from your computer.
Either way, once you’ve uploaded a photo, tap or click on the green “Restore Photo” button and then wait for the final product. Although the results are not immediate, the recovery process takes approximately 15 to 20 seconds.
First, the original image will appear on the left, and after a few seconds, the restored image will appear on the right. There is a link where you can click right below the recovered photo to download it. That’s all!
Of course, if the photo is damaged and someone’s face is torn off, GFPGAN can’t make it reappear, but the tool can improve the quality of what’s there. As an example, here is a screenshot from the version of the program on the Baseten web page , which shows one of my own family photos:
I never found out who the woman in the bottom left of the photograph was, but in the restored image I can easily identify her as my great aunt.
Additional GFPGAN Features
According to ByteXD ‘s post, in addition to fixing or restoring faces in old photos, you can also use GFPGAN to increase the resolution of an entire image. Also, since the tool works using artificial intelligence, it can also come in handy if you need to fix artistic AI portraits. ByteXD provides instructions for both scaling and AI artistic portrait enhancement for people interested in these features.