Photos

Scanned prints have their own page. Paint over creases and spots, then FrameLathe sharpens faces, makes the photo bigger and colours it if it is black and white, keeping its date.

FrameLathe restores scanned photos as well as video. Photos have their own page, Photos, beside Videos. Like everything else, they are restored on your own graphics card and never leave your computer.

Adding photos

Drop JPEG, PNG or TIFF files, or a folder of scans, anywhere in the window, or use Add photos on the Photos page. A drop of photos opens Photos wherever you dropped it. A drop that mixes tapes and prints is sorted for you: the clips go to Videos, the photos to Photos, you stay where you are, and a note says so, for example “3 clips to Videos · 40 photos to Photos”. Clips dropped while a photo is open go to Videos without taking you away from it.

The Photos page shows every photo as a picture with its state under it: Waiting, Restoring…, Delivered, or Didn’t finish. A photo you have marked says Damage marked on its picture, with the number of marks.

Mending damage

Double-click a photo, or point at it and choose Mark damage, to open it large.

Paint over a crease, tear or spot. When you let go, it is filled from the print around it, with the print’s own grain, so the patch does not read as a smudge. Erase takes paint back out.
Lift stain (L) is for a light haze, fog or rub over the picture. It lifts the veil instead of filling, so cloth, hair and edges that show through it are kept. It is drawn in light blue. For a scrape across a face, use the brush: Sharpen faces draws the detail back.
Rectangle (R) and Oval (O) are for a whole patch: drag from corner to corner, and hold Shift for a square or a circle. The shape does what the tool that is on does: it fills, lifts a stain, or erases. Freehand (F) goes back to the brush.
Undo and Redo go one mark at a time (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z). The brush size is set with − and +, the slider beside them, or [ and ].
Hold \ or Space to see the original; let go to see your repairs. Marks hides the teal paint so you can see the fill under it.
Find creases looks for long creases and outlines what it finds with dashed amber lines. An outline is only a pointer: it misses most damage, and some outlines are not damage at all. Mark it fills an outline; × (or pointing at it and pressing X) dismisses it. When nothing is outlined, that does not mean the photo is clean.
Clear all marks takes the photo back to the scan as it was; Undo brings the marks back. A fill is built inward from its edges, so a wide patch smears into streaks or swirls, and the app says so when a fill is wide. Use Lift stain for a haze over a wide area, and the face fix for a face.
To fill a crease the search missed, paint along it, or click one end and Shift-click the other for a straight line.
Find specks circles small specks of dust and spots in dashed amber. They are pointers too: a stud, a button or a catchlight can be picked up, and faces are left out for Sharpen faces. Sensitivity finds fewer or more, and the count changes as you move it. Point at one and press X to drop it, then Accept all fills the rest as one mark (one Undo takes them all back). Specks you accepted are never suggested again.

The photo check

When a photo waits on the Photos page, or when you open one, FrameLathe looks at it once with a small vision model on your graphics card. The first time, it downloads that model (69 MB) from framelathe.com; the photo itself never leaves your computer. The check only suggests:

Already in colour. With Colour on If black and white, a photo the check calls colour shows “colorize it” struck through, with a note, and is not colorized. Tap “colorize it” to colour it anyway (a sepia print can be called colour). The album says how many it left alone, for example “12 are already in colour, so we won’t colorize them”, with Colorize them anyway.
Not a photo. A case cover, the back of a card or a page of text is named in the panel. It is restored like any other unless you remove it.

Without a graphics card the WebView can use, the check runs on the processor instead, more slowly. A TIFF scan is checked when you open it. If the model cannot be downloaded, photos are simply not checked, and colour falls back to looking at how much colour the scan holds.

Your marks are kept with the photo. Go back to the album, open another photo with J and K, or leave the page, and they are saved. The restore uses exactly the repaired picture you saw.

The face fix

The brush fills a mark from the print around it. That hides a scratch across a cheek, but it cannot draw a missing eye, jaw or ear. For that there is the face fix, which is optional.

It is offered in an open photo once a mark you painted lands on a face that FrameLathe found, and only on a graphics card that can run it (see Hardware). The face gets an outline, and the panel asks Damage on a face?

Get it shows the rules the model comes with. It is Stable Diffusion 1.5 inpainting, under the CreativeML OpenRAIL-M licence, which says you agree not to use it to break the law, harm children, make false content meant to harm, harass or defame someone, expose personal information, discriminate, make automated decisions about someone’s legal rights, or give medical advice or feed justice, policing, immigration or asylum decisions. The full terms are in Settings, under Legal. Tick I agree to download it.
The download is 1.89 GB, once, from framelathe.com, and only to an activated copy. The bar counts the real bytes. You can keep marking while it comes.
Then pick the face with Redraw it. One face per photo.

When the photo runs, FrameLathe draws the marked part of that face three times, each differently, before the rest of the recipe. The saved file uses the plain fill until you choose. When you check the photo, Face · pick a version shows the plain fill and Versions 1 to 3 side by side; Use version 2 (or whichever you picked) swaps the saved file, and Use the plain fill puts it back.

Every version is a reconstruction: it invents what it draws, and none of it is recovered from the scan. While a clip is rendering, the face fix waits for it, so a photo can take longer to start.

Previews

While a photo is open, FrameLathe previews its recipe on the part of the photo you can see, with your repairs in it: faces sharpened and colour added, at the size it is shown. Zoomed in past 100%, the preview also makes it bigger, so you can see what that does to the detail. Whether to add colour is decided on the whole photo, not on the part in view.

The top of the photo says Previewing this view while it works, then Preview of this view. Hold \ or Space to compare it with the original.
Moving, zooming, changing the recipe or adding a mark starts a new preview. One preview runs at a time; a new one replaces the last. Cancel preview stops it.
Previews run while clips render. When the graphics card has no room for one beside the render, the preview waits for the clip that is running and says how long that clip has left.

A preview is a look at the screen-sized view, not the delivered file. Start restores the whole photo at full size.

The photo recipe

With no photo picked, the panel beside the album shows the album recipe. Every photo follows it, and so does each photo you add later.

Pick photos (click, or Ctrl-click for several) and the panel changes just those, which names the change beside the photo (colour off, 4× bigger; with several picked, how many were changed) and puts a small ring beside their names. In an open photo, the sentence under This photo does the same for that photo alone: tap a step to turn it on or off.

A photo you changed by hand keeps its own choice when the album recipe changes. FrameLathe tells you which photos kept theirs, for example “Colour off for 39 photos. Grandma 1987.jpg keeps its own: colour on.” Change it too brings them along, and Undo puts everything back. Back to the album recipe drops every change made to a photo by hand; Undo brings them back too. The marks you painted are not part of the recipe and are never dropped.

Sharpen faces: faces are restored on the scan’s own pixels before anything is made bigger. It is on by default. A restored face can gain detail the scan did not hold, such as sharper eyes or teeth, so look at the result before you share it.
Size: keep the size, or make it 2× or 4× bigger. 2× is the default.
Colour: If black and white (the default) colours only a photo that looks black and white, so a colour snapshot stays as it was; the photo check decides which those are (see above). Always and Never override that. Strength sets how strong the added colour is; 75% is the default.
Save as: see below.

Colour a photo already has is kept: a black-and-white plate in a red velvet case is coloured, and the case and its gilt frame stay as scanned, as does a hand tint. Added colour is invented. There is no record of what colours the scene really had, so a coat can come out the wrong colour, and nothing can check it.

Starting

Start on the Photos page runs every photo waiting, and any clips waiting on Videos too, one job at a time. Start on Videos does the same.

What it saves

PNG by default.
TIFF when the scan was a TIFF, so an archive stays in its format.
JPEG when you choose JPEG for sharing.

The file is named <photo>_restored and goes to the output folder, or beside the scan. Every format keeps the photo’s date, its colour profile and its DPI, including a photo you marked. A photo the camera or scanner stored on its side is saved upright. The scan itself is never changed.

Checking the results

Delivered photos are checked on the Photos page, not in Review. After a run the album groups them: To check first, then anything that did not finish, Flagged, photos still waiting, and Approved (folded away until you press Show). Each delivered tile is split, the scan on the left and the restored photo on the right, with the photo’s date under its name (“Undated” when it has none, or the date you added). The Photos item in the sidebar counts the ones still to check.

Open a delivered photo to see the scan and the restored file as a wipe: drag the line, or hold \ to see the scan across the whole photo. Fit, 100% and Wipe sit under it, and the date is under the print (“Undated” when the scan had none). The panel says what ran, in plain words, with added colour marked as invented, and the name it was saved as.

Save a before/after image writes the scan and the restored photo side by side, labelled Before and After, as one JPEG to share. It is in the panel for one photo, and under the album, where it makes a sheet of the photos you picked (or the delivered ones), up to six. The scan and the restored file are not changed.

Approve (A) and Flag (F) work as they do for clips, and move on to the next photo still to check. J and K step through the photos; Escape goes back to the album.
To tidy the album, Clear beside Approved, Flagged or Didn’t finish takes that section out (into History), and Remove on a tile, Delete, or right-click takes out one photo or the picked ones. Click picks a photo, Ctrl adds one, Shift picks a run and Ctrl+A picks them all; the bar above the album then offers Approve and Remove for the picked photos. Each has Undo, and none deletes the scan or the restored file.
Fix this spot opens the photo again with its marks, for painting what still needs fixing. It is restored again as a new file beside the first (_v2) when you press Start, and the first file stays where it is. Undo puts the delivered photo back.
Start again from the original opens the scan as it was, with no marks, to mark it again from the start. It too is restored as a new file, and the earlier one stays.
Every earlier delivery is listed under Earlier versions on the photo’s Check page, with what ran and where it was saved. Compare with the scan shows it in the before/after wipe, and the album tile says which version the photo is on.

When the last photo in the album is approved, with none flagged or waiting, FrameLathe says so once and offers Open folder and Save a before/after image.

Undated scans

Most scans carry no date. Where a scan has none, the photo says Undated · Add a date, in an open photo and under a delivered one. Type the year, and the month if you know it; there is no day. The date shows as “1965 · added by you”.

The date is written into the restored file only, never into the scan. For a photo still waiting it goes in when the photo runs; for one already delivered, FrameLathe writes it into the saved file without restoring the photo again. A scan that has its own date always keeps it, and offers nothing to type.

What it does not do yet

A TIFF scan opens for marking and previews like any other photo, though opening a large one takes a few seconds longer. In the album it shows a thumbnail only once it has been marked. A 16-bit TIFF is restored and saved at 8 bits per colour.

Dark or heavy stains are not lifted: paint over them to fill them instead.