How to repair and restore photos: spots, red eye, old prints and lenses

firelet.media Gallery repairs photos in the Editor tab on Windows (Ctrl+3). The Repair section heals dust and blemishes, fixes red eye, turns scanned negatives into positives and restores faded, scratched old prints. Lens and perspective straightens leaning buildings and corrects lens distortion. As with every edit in the gallery, the original file is never changed.

Remove spots and blemishes: Heal and Clone#

Heal blends a spot into its surroundings: dust on a scan, a blemish, a stray power line. Clone copies another area over it exactly, which suits hard edges and patterns.

1. Open the photo in the Editor and click Repair.
2. Click Heal (or Clone) under Spots.
3. Set Size a little larger than the spot, plus Feather and Opacity.
4. Click the spot on the photo. A solid circle marks it and a dashed circle shows where the repair comes from.
5. If the result looks wrong, drag the dashed circle to a cleaner area.

Right-click a spot to remove it, or click Remove all spots to start again. You can click a spot again later to select it and change its size.

Fix red eye#

1. Click Find red eyes. The gallery looks at each face it finds and fixes the red pupils, then says how many it fixed.
2. If it misses one, click Click an eye… and click each red pupil.
3. Right-click a pupil to undo just that one, or click Clear to undo them all.

Find red eyes uses Windows' own face detector. If your copy of Windows doesn't have one, the gallery says so, and you click each eye instead.

Turn a scanned negative into a positive#

Under Film negative, click Colour negative or Black-and-white negative. The gallery turns the scan positive and "takes away the orange of colour film". Fine-tune the result with Light and Colour. Not a negative turns it off again.

When you scan negatives with the gallery itself, the scanner's Film option does this for you: each frame is turned positive with an edit, and the scanned file stays as it is. How to scan photos and documents covers scanning.

Restore an old photo in one click#

For faded, scratched prints, the Old photo tools at the top of Repair use AI that runs on your PC:

1. Open the scan in the Editor and click Repair.
2. Leave Add colour ticked to colourise a black-and-white photo, or untick it to keep it monochrome. It is ticked by itself when the photo looks black and white.
3. Click Restore old photo. It fixes scratches, then noise, then adds colour if asked.
4. Watch the progress line; click Stop if you change your mind.

Each step is also a button of its own: Fix scratches, AI denoise, Unblur and Colourise. The first time you use one, the gallery asks before downloading its AI model.

Make a photo bigger: AI upscale#

Under Upscale, click 2× as a new photo or 4× as a new photo. The gallery "writes a larger copy beside the original, with your edits", such as photo (upscaled 2×).jpg, adds it to the library and opens it in the Editor. A very large photo may be too big for 4×; try 2×, or crop it first.

To enlarge many photos at once, use AI upscale (2× or 4×) in the Export window instead. See how to export photos.

Correct lens distortion and perspective#

The Lens and perspective section fixes what the camera's lens and angle did:

• Use the lens profile corrects distortion, colour fringes and dark corners for the lens that took the photo, using the lensfun database. The profiles are a one-time download. The gallery shows the profile it found, or says the photo doesn't name its lens.
• Distortion, Vignetting, Red/cyan fringe and Blue/yellow fringe do the same by hand.
• Auto upright "stands leaning verticals upright and levels the photo". Ideal for buildings shot from below.
• Vertical and Horizontal tilt the perspective by hand.

The gallery zooms in a little to hide the empty edges a correction leaves. Use Crop and rotate afterwards if you want a different frame.

Where repairs are kept#

Spots, red eyes, the negative setting and lens corrections are edits like any other: saved in the library, listed in History and undone with Ctrl+Z. The AI repairs are kept beside the library, in the ai folder under %LOCALAPPDATA%\PictureGallery. Back that folder up with gallery.db, as how to back up your photos and your library explains.

When you want a finished file, export it with With my edits — crop, turn, light and colour ticked: every repair is in the copy, and the scan is untouched. Does firelet.media Gallery change my original photos? explains why.