In this guide 1. Identify what kind of mark you are fixing 2. Start from a truly clean scan 3. The correct order of operations 4. What radius and threshold actually do 5. Creases, tears and large stains 6. What local repair cannot do 7. Final cleanup before sharpening

A single bright diagonal line across a family portrait can ruin the whole photo. You remember the day clearly, but the print argues with you — a white scratch runs through grandmother's face, dark spots dot the sky like freckles, and a crease cuts across the wedding cake. These marks feel permanent, but most of them are not. They are surface events: the emulsion has been scraped, dust landed during printing, or the paper was folded.

Removing scratches well is less about power than about order and restraint. A heavy-handed filter will clear the lines but also erase eyelashes, lace and tree bark. This guide teaches you to first identify the kind of damage, then run the corrections in the right order, and finally tune the two key sliders so that defects disappear while real detail survives. As with everything on this site, the repair runs locally in your browser — the photo never leaves your device.

Identify what kind of mark you are fixing

Not every mark is a scratch, and treating them all the same is the first mistake. Look closely at the scan and sort the damage into one of four types.

  • White scratches are the most common. They appear as pale lines because the colored emulsion was scraped away, exposing the light paper base beneath. These are the easiest to fix because the tool simply blends the line with its surrounding pixels.
  • Dark scratches and pressure marks are darker lines caused by the emulsion being compressed or exposed to pressure. They respond to the same smoothing, but because dark lines break up faces and clothing, they need a gentler touch.
  • Dust specks and spots are small round marks — white dots from dust on the scanner glass, dark dots from airborne dirt embedded in the print. Most disappear in a single moderate pass.
  • Stains and foxing are larger, irregular brown or yellow blotches caused by moisture or acidic storage. These are harder: they blend with real image content, and over-processing smears the surrounding photo.

Knowing which type you have sets your expectations. Thin scratches and dust are routine. Creases and tears are manageable. Large water stains and missing emulsion need honesty — read the limits section below before you fall in love with a result the tool cannot deliver.

Start from a truly clean scan

Many "scratches" in a digital file were never on the photo. They arrived on the scanner bed as dust and fibers, and every scan you make inherits them. Before you repair anything, clean the scanner glass with a microfiber cloth and gently brush loose dust off the print with a soft brush. Scan at 600 DPI rather than 300 — higher resolution gives the smoothing algorithm more pixels to work with, so thin lines blend more naturally. If you are scanning film rather than prints, our film scan restoration guide covers the extra dust and grain behavior specific to negatives and slides.

One practical habit: scan a blank white page after cleaning the glass. If that scan still shows white specks, your glass is still dirty — clean it again before blaming the old photo. A surprising amount of scratch removal turns out to be scanner hygiene. If you have not scanned yet, work through our scanning setup guide first.

The correct order of operations

The order matters more than the settings. Follow this sequence and the repair stays clean; scramble it and you will spend hours fighting artifacts.

  1. Fix color and fading first. Yellowed, faded prints change how you perceive contrast and marks. Do the white balance, contrast and saturation work in the Faded Photo Fixer before touching scratches, because a properly color-balanced image makes remaining defects far easier to see and judge.
  2. Denoise if the source is grainy film. Film grain can be mistaken for hundreds of tiny spots. A gentle Photo Denoiser pass first collapses that grain, so the spot remover does not waste effort trying to "fix" natural texture.
  3. Remove scratches and spots. Only now run the Scratch & Spot Remover.
  4. Sharpen last. Sharpening amplifies every remaining defect, so it must come after repair — never before. Read our sharpening guide for the right amount.

If you only remember one rule: never sharpen, then repair. That order guarantees you will see a halo around every scratch you later try to smooth.

What radius and threshold actually do

The Scratch & Spot Remover has two controls, and understanding them is the difference between a clean result and a blurry one.

  • Radius (1–2, start near 1). Radius sets the width of the area around each suspicious pixel that the tool uses to guess the correct color. A radius of 1 targets very thin scratches and fine dust. Increase it only for noticeably wider scratches or spots; beyond about 2 you begin to average together real detail, and edges like lips, eyes and hair start to go soft. Think of radius as the brush size of an invisible eraser — small for thin lines, never large.
  • Threshold (0–100, start near 50). Threshold decides how different a pixel must look from its neighbors before the tool treats it as a defect. At a low threshold, the tool is aggressive: it smooths almost everything and may wash out texture. At a high threshold, it is conservative: it only attacks the most obvious bright lines and dark dots, leaving faint marks behind. For most family photos, begin around 50, then raise it slightly if you still see spots, and lower it slightly only if fine detail is being lost.

Work in small passes rather than one dramatic setting. Run threshold at 50 and inspect; if thin scratches remain, nudge up by 10 and run again. Comparing with the original through the before/after slider tells you the truth — defects should vanish, but the texture of a wool sweater, individual hairs and eyelashes should all still be there.

Creases, tears and large stains

A straight crease across a print is a shallow V-shaped fracture in the emulsion. On the scan it shows as a darker line surrounded by a faint lighter band. The scratch remover handles a light crease well, because the crease is thin and the surrounding pixels are predictable. But a deep crease that actually folded the paper — where one side of the fold is permanently compressed — often carries a shadow that no local smoothing can fully hide. In those cases, run the repair at threshold 40–50 to soften the line, then accept the faintest residual trace rather than pushing the tool until the whole area turns into a smudge.

Large water stains and foxing are the honest limit of automatic repair. Because the brown blotch blends into real skin, grass or wall texture, the tool cannot tell stain from content, and aggressive smoothing will smear whatever is underneath. The realistic approach is to reduce the worst of the blotch with a moderate pass, then leave it. A restored photo with one honest age mark is more believable — and more loved — than a digitally erased one that looks melted.

What local repair cannot do

Browser-based repair is powerful but honest. It blends pixels that are already there; it does not invent missing content. If a corner of the print is torn away, leaving a blank white gap, no slider will reconstruct what stood there. If a scratch ran straight across an eye, the tool can smooth the line but cannot restore the iris detail that the scratch erased. If half a face is completely faded to blank paper, the best result is a clean, smooth blank — not a guessed face. This is the difference between repair and fabrication, and it is exactly why your originals remain untouched: you can always try again, and you never lose the true document.

Final cleanup before sharpening

After the scratch pass, zoom across the whole image once, checking sky, skin and fabric separately for any leftover specks. A single remaining white dot on a dark jacket draws the eye more than the rest of the photo put together. When the marks are gone, the photo is ready for its final step — a gentle sharpen to recover the crispness that scanning softens away, using the technique in our sharpening guide. Then export a PNG master, keep the scan untouched, and enjoy a print that finally looks the way you remembered it.