New in Photoshop: Photo restoration made easy

Photoshop has a new Photo Restoration function that is easy to use. You may use their AI-trained filter to help restore old or damaged photographs.

What is Photo Restoration exactly?

Photo Restoration is available in Photoshop Beta. Adobe announced it in June 2022. It restores aged or damaged photos by employing a new Neural Filter that uses AI. You may use basic editing options or further refine them using further adjustments. These are all sliders and are easy to use.

How do you use it?

To access the filter, go to File > Neural Filters > Photo Restoration and switch the toggle to “on.” This will initiate the filter download and activate it for use if you haven’t downloaded it previously.

When you switch the toggle to “on,” Photoshop will automatically engage the main editing features and restore the photo. Typically, this will take a short while. The speed in part depends on the speed of your computer as well as other variables.

Main editing features

• Photo enhancement — Improve color, contrast, and details
• Enhance faces — Improve the detail on face specifically
• Scratch reduction — Restore areas of the photo that have been scratched or damaged (off by default)

If your photo is scratched or damaged, engage the slider. You will have to wait again as the Neural Filter examines and processes the photo.

Adjustments

If your photo requires more work, you can open the Adjustments section underne to access more sliders for the following:

• Noise reduction
• Color noise reduction
• Halftone artifact reduction
• JPEG artifacts reduction

Technical stuff

I rarely had to wait more than 20 seconds for any of the adjustments on a mid-2017 27″ i7 iMac. However, if you have an older computer, you might wait a little longer.

Photo Restoration appeared automatically in Photoshop 2023 (Version 24.0.0). However, it did not appear in Photoshop 2022 (Version 23.5.2). I attempted to download Photoshop Beta from the Creative Cloud Desktop. However, it still did not appear in Photoshop 2022.

I should mention that when I opened Photoshop 2023, I received a pop-up dialogue box that stated, “Mac OS X version 11.7.0 or later is recommended for maximum performance and correct operation of Adobe Photoshop 2023. An earlier version of Mac OS X was detected.”

Conclusion

It’s really nice to be able to restore older photos so easily and quickly. The features for the face enhancement, general sharpening and detail extraction worked quite well. Using the more advanced features, I was also able to remove some yellowing from images.

There were times in which Photo Restoration eliminated wires and even a rope for a crowd control stanchion, interpreting these as cracks or damage in the image. You may address this by adjusting the slider until it is to your liking.