Restore a Discolored Photo

How it works

1. 1

   Upload a scan or a phone photo of the print

   Scan the photo, or shoot it flat in window light — JPG, PNG, or WebP up to 7MB. Avoid warm indoor bulbs and coloured walls: they add a second cast on top of the one you are trying to fix, and the AI cannot tell the two apart.

   Expect: A uniform magenta, orange, or cyan shift corrects well in one pass because the AI can anchor on things it knows should be neutral — skin, teeth, a white shirt. A print where one dye layer has gone entirely comes back plausible rather than exact: the AI rebuilds the missing colour from what remains, so a dress you remember as teal may land close, not perfect.
2. 2

   Name the cast, not the subject

   Type what is wrong with the colour: 'restore this discolored photo — remove the magenta colour cast and bring skin tones and whites back to neutral, keeping everything else as it is.' Say which colour the print has drifted toward; 'magenta', 'orange', and 'cyan' each steer the correction differently, and 'fix the colours' steers it nowhere.

   Tip: Mention one thing whose real colour you know — 'the car was dark blue', 'her dress was yellow' — and the correction has an anchor for the whole print.

   Copy one of these to get started:

   Magenta shift (most 70s and 80s prints) restore this discolored photo — remove the magenta colour cast and bring skin tones and whites back to neutral, keeping everything else exactly as it is

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   Orange or red-orange shift restore this discolored photo — remove the strong orange colour shift, bring skin tones back to natural and whites back to white, and change nothing else

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   Cyan or blue-green shift restore this discolored photo — neutralise the cyan-blue colour cast so skin looks natural and whites are clean, and keep the rest of the print as it is

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   Cast with a known anchor colour restore this discolored photo by removing the magenta cast — the woman's dress was bright yellow and the car was dark blue — and bring skin tones and whites back to neutral

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   3 more prompts

   Discolored portrait, skin first restore this discolored portrait — correct the colour cast so the skin tones look natural and healthy, leave the person's features, hair, and expression exactly as they are

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   Uneven fade, one band worse restore this discolored photo — remove the overall magenta cast, and even out the band along the top edge that has faded more orange than the rest

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   Cast only, keep the age correct the colour cast in this discolored photo so skin and whites are neutral, but keep the grain, softness, and slightly faded look of the original print

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3. 3

   Check the skin, the whites, and the greys

   Skin is the best judge: it should look like skin, not pink or tan-orange. Then look at anything white or grey — a shirt, a wall, the print border — and confirm it reads neutral. If skin is right but the sky has gone odd, ask for a second pass on that area only.

4. 4

   Use a marker for a patch that shifted differently

   Prints that sat half-under a frame mat or an album sleeve fade unevenly, leaving a band that is more orange than the rest. Tap a marker on that band and say 'match this area to the rest of the print.' Markers are optional and only for the spot the whole-print correction did not even out.