Photo Restore
A small Mac app for old family-photo scans. Drag in a faded print or a whole folder of them, and it fixes the fading, sharpens the faces, and scales them up. It all happens on your Mac.
What it does to a photo
- Brings back faded contrast
- Stretches washed-out scans back to a full tonal range without shifting the color. It never colorizes: a black-and-white photo stays black and white.
- Scales up small prints
- Upscales 2×, 3× or 4× with Real-ESRGAN, or fits the result to a size you choose. Big images are processed in overlapping tiles, so there are no visible seams.
- Sharpens faces, and only faces
- Finds each face, restores it with GFPGAN, and blends it back in with a mask so hair, clothes and background are left alone. Grain and skin texture are matched to the original, and an intensity slider lets you keep it subtle.
- Handles a whole shoebox
- Drop in a folder of a hundred scans. A filmstrip shows every photo's progress, and a before/after slider lets you compare each result with the original.
How it works
Each photo goes through the same steps, in this order. You can switch off any step you don't want in the settings panel.
- Auto-contrastBrightness is rebalanced on luminance only, so the original color cast is kept.
- UpscaleReal-ESRGAN enlarges the whole image, tile by tile, with feathered seams.
- Find facesApple's Vision framework locates each face and aligns it to a 512 px crop.
- Restore facesGFPGAN rebuilds detail in each crop. Faces that are already sharp can be skipped.
- Paste backA face-parsing mask composites the restored face into the photo, with color and grain matched to its surroundings.
Your photos stay on your Mac
Every step runs locally on Apple Silicon through Core ML. There is no account, no upload and no cloud service. The app goes online for two things only: downloading its models once, and checking for app updates.
Originals are never modified. Results are written to a separate output folder, and existing files are only replaced if you turn on overwriting.
| Model | Job | License |
|---|---|---|
| Real-ESRGAN x4plus | Upscaling | BSD-3 |
| GFPGAN | Face restoration | Apache-2.0 |
| BiSeNet | Face masks | MIT |
Questions
macOS says the app can't be opened
Photo Restore isn't signed with a paid Apple Developer ID yet, so Gatekeeper blocks it the first time. To open it anyway:
- Drag Photo Restore from the disk image into Applications and try to open it once.
- Open System Settings, go to Privacy & Security, and click Open Anyway next to the Photo Restore message.
Or, from Terminal: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Photo Restore.app"
Does it work on Intel Macs?
No. It needs an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later) running macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.
Can I use it without an internet connection?
Yes, once the models are installed. If you already have the three model files
(RealESRGAN4x.mlmodel, GFPGAN.mlmodel,
FaceParsing.mlmodel), choose Install from Folder on the
first-run screen instead of downloading them.
Will it change what people's faces look like?
Face restoration models fill in detail that the scan doesn't contain, so it can. Lower the intensity slider to keep more of the original texture, turn on "Skip already-sharp faces", or switch face restoration off entirely. The before/after slider makes it easy to check each result.
How do updates work?
The app checks this site's update feed using Sparkle and offers new versions as they come out. Every update is signed, and the app verifies the signature before installing it.