AI upscaler turned my grandma's only wedding photo into a wax figure with the wrong eye color
I finally got around to scanning my grandma's wedding picture from 1958, and it had a big crack right through her veil, so I figured one of those AI photo repair apps would fix it in a minute. Two hours and $14.99 later, the app had smoothed her face into something that looked like a mannequin and gave her bright green eyes, which is funny because hers were brown and she hated green. I tried three more tools and one of them turned my grandpa's suit into a blurry navy blob while the stupid background got sharp as a magazine cover. What got me was the app's little 'enhance' slider, because sliding it up just made everything worse. I ended up printing the original scan with the crack still in it and hanging that instead. My question is for people who do photo restoration for real: is there any AI tool out there that leaves skin texture alone, or am I just better off learning the clone stamp in a cheap editor? I am not paying for another app that guesses.
The clone stamp and healing brush in a cheap editor will treat her face WAY better than any app, because you decide what gets fixed and nothing gets invented. Work at high zoom on small spots at a time and keep a copy of the original scan untouched. On skin, a light grain or texture layer goes a long way toward keeping it from looking plastic.