Restore AI repairs the damage time left behind in your most important photos. Coming this April.
Old photographs often carry decades of memories, but also decades of damage. Today, we announce Restore AI, a powerful new AI photo restoration module arriving in ON1 Photo RAW MAX this April. Restore AI automatically repairs damaged photos, restores faded colors, enhances lost detail, and can even colorize black-and-white images—making it easier to recover photographs that time has worn down.
Nearly every family has them—boxes of aging photographs tucked away in closets, old albums passed down through generations, or stacks of prints slowly fading over time. These images carry personal history, but dust, scratches, wrinkles, fading color, and grain often make them difficult to view or share. Restore AI was designed to help recover and preserve those photographs.
“With Restore AI, we wanted to give people a simple way to recover the photos that matter most,” said Patrick Smith, Senior VP at ON1. “Some of the most meaningful photographs we own are decades old and damaged. Restore AI helps people recover old photos, repair decades of damage, and share those moments again with family.”
Traditional photo restoration software often requires hours of manual retouching to repair scratches, rebuild damaged areas, or correct faded colors. Restore AI simplifies that process dramatically using advanced AI and cloud-powered processing. Restore AI will analyze each image to detect common problems in aging prints and scanned photos. It automatically repairs dust, scratches, wrinkles, and tears while restoring color and improving clarity.
Restore AI runs state-of-the-art AI models in the cloud, allowing it to perform restorations that would normally require specialized high-end hardware. These models are too large to run efficiently on most desktop GPUs, but cloud processing provides the compute power and memory needed to analyze images deeply and reconstruct missing detail.
The result is a cleaner, sharper image—often significantly improving on the original scan. Restore AI can also rebuild texture and restore facial detail in soft or poorly digitized photographs.
Restore AI is also built with privacy and trust in mind. Photos processed in the cloud with Restore AI are handled securely and are never used to train AI models or improve datasets. Your images remain yours—private, protected, and processed only for the restoration task you request.
Seamlessly Integrated into ON1 Photo RAW MAX
Restore AI is fully integrated within ON1 Photo RAW MAX, allowing users to continue organizing, editing, and sharing their photos within the same workflow. It works hand-in-hand with other important features for the restoration processing including the unique negative mode for inverting and color correcting photographs of negatives and generative AI based retouching tools for removing large distractions. Once images are repaired, users can organize albums, add metadata, batch process collections, and export or share restored photos without leaving the application. Restore AI also supports batch album restoration, making it easier to process large collections of scanned images.
Unlike many cloud-based restoration services, Restore AI requires no credits or tokens. The feature is included with ON1 Photo RAW MAX and ON1 Photo Studio subscriptions. Owners of an ON1 Photo RAW MAX perpetual license will also receive one full year of unlimited restorations at no additional cost.
Availability
ON1 Restore AI will be available in April 2026 as a new module exclusively inside ON1 Photo RAW 2026 MAX. Existing ON1 Photo RAW 2026 (and earlier versions) owners can upgrade to Photo RAW MAX to access Restore AI, while current Photo RAW 2026 MAX owners will receive Restore AI as part of a free update in April.
Perpetual license owners of ON1 Photo RAW 2026 MAX will receive unlimited restorations for one full year using cloud-powered AI. Upgrading to future major versions renews that one-year access, ensuring continued restoration capabilities over time.
Subscribers to ON1 Photo RAW MAX or ON1 Photo Studio receive unlimited restorations for as long as their subscription remains active.
ON1 is also exploring options to allow the restoration AI models to run locally on desktop hardware in the future. While there is no confirmed timeline for local processing. To learn more about Restore AI and ON1 Photo RAW MAX, visit our product page.
What’s Ahead for ON1
We will continue focusing on delivering steady improvements and meaningful innovation across Photo RAW and Photo RAW MAX. In addition to the upcoming release of Restore AI, another update is planned before the end of March for all 2026 versions of Photo RAW (before Restore AI arrives to Photo RAW MAX in April), bringing a range of fixes and performance enhancements.
Looking ahead, the development team is actively working on significant improvements to the RAW processing engine, with a continued focus on image quality and reliability. ON1 is also investing heavily in improving browsing and culling workflows to make managing large photo collections faster and more intuitive.
Noise reduction is another key area of development, with ongoing work aimed at delivering cleaner results while preserving natural detail.
These efforts reflect our ongoing commitment to building a product photographers can trust—while continuing to push forward with meaningful, practical innovation.
About ON1
ON1 develops powerful photo editing software designed for photographers of all skill levels. By combining professional tools with intuitive workflows and modern technology, ON1 helps photographers preserve, enhance, and share the images that tell their stories.