Use the NEW Photo Restoration Neural Filter in Photoshop 2023 to Restore OLD Photos!

Photo Restoration Neural Filter in Photoshop 2023

In this video, I’m going to show you how to use the new Neural Filter in Photoshop 2023 to restore old photos. This filter is a great way to restore damaged photos and make them look like they were taken new again.

If you’ve got old photos that need restoration, then this video is for you! I’ll show you how to use the Neural Filter in Photoshop 2023 to restore old photos and make them look like they were taken just yesterday! With this filter, you’ll be able to fix any photo damage and make them look incredible again!

How to Enhance Your Photo Quality

When you have an image you want to restore. There are a couple of things you might want to do to get the best results or the best quality image in the end.

Some old photos may have been scanned from a small photo to start with. I’m going to start off with Lightroom and use it to enhance image quality. In Lightroom, all you need to do is go up to photo and to enhance. We’re going to make sure super resolution is checked. Like it says here., it doubles the image resolution ideal for large displays and prints.

I’m going to uncheck create stack, then I’m going to click Enhance. Lightroom has created an enhanced version of this photo and it is in a DNG format that is a raw format. All I’m going to do is export it to a folder. I’m going to choose later. I want to export as a DNG file. I mean double click on my profile from Lightroom and it opens up in Camera Raw.

If you want to make any of the basic adjustments like exposure contrast, you can do that here. I’m not going to make any changes. I’ll click on Open and now we’re in Photoshop. The next thing you want to do is unlock this background layer. And because we’re eventually going to add color, we want to make sure that this image is in RGB format.

So if we come up here to image mode, it says grayscale. We can’t use the colorize neural filter if it’s in grayscale, so we’re going to change it to RGB Color. You know, I’m going to call this layer original and convert to layer to a smart object and I’m going to make three more copies top copy and call that color.

Then the next one is called face and rename this one restoration. So now we’ve got our work separated in smart objects because we’re going to be using filters . We’re going to want to go back possibly to make changes with our smart filters. Also, want to draw your attention to the size it is 886 pixels by 1280 pixels 300 PPI.

Here’s the original which is or 433 by 604 and 72 PPI. So it did double in size and resolution. So now we can turn off these top two layers. And on the restoration layer. So now we’re going to go to filter neural filters. And down here under restoration is photo restoration. If you’ve never used this filter, there may be a cloud icon for you to click and download the filter.

How to Use the Photo Restoration Neural Filter

So I’m going to click and you can see it is processing on the device when you first click on this photo restoration filter. These are the values that Photoshop gives it. For photo enhancement, this slider actually helps remove noise and grain while trying to maintain details. If you move the slider to much it will soften the photo possibly too much.

You want to move this over and see the effect on your photo. Do what you like. I suggest putting in around 50. Face enhance., If a face is detected, it will try to improve the details of the face again. If you try to move them too far or too much, you may see more of an effect that you want.

So I’m going to bring this back a little bit. And scratch reduction, this is good for removing some of the white marks or scratches. But again, you have to look at the image to find a balance. This may remove white parts of clothing, shiny objects. So be on the lookout for that. Try it out and see the effect is on your image.

I think this may have gone too far, so I’m going to take this way down, but is probably a good place to start this mark here. We’re going to take care of that. You have all these other adjustments. I might use a little bit more noise reduction, not too much. I don’t want it to smooth out the image.

There’s two before and there’s the after. We’re going to output this as a smart filter and say, okay. Now that we have our neural filter as a smart filter, we can now paint any details back in that may have been removed with the neural filter. So with a soft round brush and make my color swatch set to black a low flow, I can paint in some of these details down here in the dress, some of the texture that comes back.

I can also take care of this white mark right here. That is a result of one of my settings of the restoration filter. Now we can turn on this next layer or go back into our restoration filter on that and turn it back on. And I’m going to add a little bit more to a face enhance. I won’t change any of the other settings.

I’ll leave my photo enhancement there just change the enhance face and say, okay, now I’m going to add a black layer mask to that layer. So this is the advantage of doing this. On another layer is I can paint the effects of the enhance face only in the face area or to any other areas that I want to show.

So now if I want the eyes to stand out a little bit, paint with white on this black layer mask, hit X to change my color swatch and I’m painting in some of that effect in the eyes, just any of the areas that I want to stand out a little bit more, any other facial features that I think should stand out.

And again, since these are smart filters, you can go back in and change any of the values of your restoration neural filter. Now we have all our layers. As far as the restoration neural filter, you can see why we used smart objects. It created smart filters in an opportunity for us to use the masks on the smart filters.

And if you just want to restore to black and white, you could probably stop here.

How to Use the Colorize Neural Filter

But we’re going to go further. We’re going to colorize this image with the colorized neural filter. I’ll turn on the color layer, select that and change to blend mode to color so we won’t see any of the luminosity values of this layer, only the color.

Now we’re going to go back into filter, Neural filters, and this time we’re going to click on colorize, click on the colorize button. Now we have all these adjustments here. We can choose a color profile, which I don’t think is necessary in this case, but you can reduce noise, color, artifact reduction and saturation. What I’m going to do is take care of the color of her dress here.

We’ll click on a point over here. The color picker will come up, can choose a color and say, okay, you can select a point. You can change the strength of that point or remove it or change the color by double clicking right here. And you can also click and hold alt or option and drag that point so that you can put that same color at different point at another point to even out the colors, something like that.

And you can see what color artifact reduction does takes too much away from the photo. You can pull that back noise reduction. I’ll output this to another smart filter there’s without the color there’s with the color. Now I can use my smart filter mask and I’m going to paint with black a little bit on this chain right here that doesn’t need to be colored.

You can do this at other parts of the image that you may see needs to be touched up.

Get my lightroom presets here ➡️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com/presets

See my photography website here ➡️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com

Read the previous blog article here ➡️ How to Use Blend If in Photoshop To Improve Your Photos