Got boxes of old film negatives sitting around? In this video, Dan walks through a complete workflow for digitizing, converting, and restoring old film photos using Restore AI inside ON1 Photo RAW MAX 2026.4.
You’ll learn several ways to scan film, including flatbed scanners, dedicated film scanners, DSLR and mirrorless camera setups, and even smartphone workflows. From there, Dan shows how to convert color negatives into positive images, correct exposure and white balance, crop and straighten scans, and use Restore AI to clean up dust, softness, noise, and aging artifacts while preserving the original film look.
Whether you’re restoring family memories, organizing archived negatives, or building a modern film photography workflow, ON1 Photo RAW MAX 2026.4 gives photographers an easy way to digitize and improve old film photos with AI-powered tools.
BeginnerON1 Photo RAW2026Dan HarlacherRestoreRestoration
On May 30, 2026 at 10:26 am Adam Rubinstein wrote:
Excellent tutorial Dan. Ironically, I was working on a bunch of old film photos which had been scanned in the early days of digital photography at low resolution (512×768 0.1 MP). Restore AI did a really good job although it upscales the resultant image so much that the results can become unrealistic (plastic). It would be great if there was a setting to limit the upsizing to a multiple to better preserve realism. As I mentioned in the comments of the last video, the AI algorithms are struggling particularly with teeth (and other features), frequently producing hallucinations. Finally, I am wondering about the utility for landscapes and other images. If you recall, I remarked that Resize AI seems to downscale high resolution RAW images to work on in AI (seems understandable), but then it resizes them at the end where all of the detail is destroyed. Thoughts?
On May 30, 2026 at 10:53 am hcrespo2021@gmail.com wrote:
The new improvements to ON1 are absolutely fantastic. In 1979 I was invited by the government of China to visit the country for an engineering exposition. I spent several weeks in the country taking picture with slide film in my them new camera. I came back and I thought that I had a good number of good pictures. Surprise!!!! I just put a whole batch of them through Restore, and the results blew my mind. I did not restore faces, not ready yet. But the results are fantastic. I will not comment on the AI technical issues, but I have to tell you that from an artistic point of view the software performs in an incredible manner. CONGRATULATIONS on releasing an incredible product.
On May 30, 2026 at 1:59 pm Frank Wormwood wrote:
While I was amazed at how well restore worked on older photographs, I found one problem you may have a solution to. On very old photos of people, the AI restore feature would really change the facial features so much that they were not identifiable. For instance, an old photo of a man with mutton chops was reproduced as clean shaven. A woman’s features were changed so much that family would not recognize her. Admittedly these were very old photos in poor condition. The program did a great job of cleaning and restoring except for faces. Suggestions?
On May 30, 2026 at 5:41 pm Fran Woods wrote:
Thanks for the video. It helps a lot. What was the name of that little setup you used to scan the negatives? It looked very useful.
I’ve been using the restore ai feature for a few days now. It does a good job with inanimate things like buildings but is pretty dreadful on faces. There are a number of issues which would be lovely to get fixed.
1) It only selects one or two faces and ignores the rest. I’d like to be able to specifically select all the other faces in the image.
2) I’ve noticed that it usually picks faces directly facing the camera and seems to handle those reasonably well.
3) Most of the time the resulting faces are very distorted and lacking proper facial features.
There may be some other issues but that’s all I can think of at the moment.
I can send you some examples of the before and after if you’d like.
On May 31, 2026 at 2:37 am Jan Masař wrote:
Hello! I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the fantastic video and the demonstration of how negative films can be processed with Restore AI. This program does a great job! But it is true that this program only works great with buildings and other inanimate objects. But is it still terrible with faces? But we have to admit that Restore AI is just the beginning of a very long journey before AI is so perfect and we will all be 100% satisfied? Thank you to all the developers and people who work and will continue to improve the program: ON1 PhotoRAW 2026?
On May 31, 2026 at 6:11 am doug2 wrote:
can someone provide the name of the copy stand?
On May 31, 2026 at 12:07 pm Nancy Balluck wrote:
The scanner is called DigitaLIZA by Lomographics. B&H sells it but it is out of stock. Other places sell it as well. Check the reviews and ratings though. I found this info from Google!
On May 31, 2026 at 12:44 pm Nancy Balluck wrote:
The scanner is called DigitaLIZA by Lomographics. B&H sells it but it is out of stock. Other places sell it as well. Check the reviews and ratings though. I found this info from Google!
The DigitaLIZA Max version comes with a cell phone stand that can be removed if you want to photograph your film using a digital camera instead of your cell phone. It does look like Lomographics has ths product in stock for $109.