ON1 Photo Raw 2026.4's Restore AI Can Fix Old Photos, But It Has Real Limits

ON1 Photo Raw 2026.4 just landed, and the headline feature is Restore AI, a tool that can repair damaged prints, colorize old black-and-white images, and clean up degraded film scans. If you have a box of old family photos sitting around, this update is worth your attention.

Coming to you from Anthony Morganti, this detailed video walks through every major addition in ON1 Photo Raw 2026.4, starting with the new home screen that greets you when you launch the app. The home screen gives you quick access to recent folders, albums, and images, and even includes practice files you can work on right away. If you preferred the old behavior where the app opened straight to the Browse module, you can switch back in Preferences under the Startup Options section. The real focus of the update, though, is Restore AI, which is exclusive to the Max version of the software because it processes images on ON1's servers. Morganti demonstrates it on a creased, yellowed old print, and the results are striking: the tool repairs the physical damage, sharpens the image, and colorizes it automatically.

Restore AI gives you four preset modes: Auto, Faithful, Monochrome, and Sepia. From there, you can fine-tune tone, color, saturation, and sharpness. There's also a text prompt field where you can type instructions, like asking it to add clouds to a sky or remove a distracting element from the frame. Morganti tests this on a film shot taken with a Leica M6, typing in a combined prompt to add clouds, remove a log jutting into the frame, and sharpen the image. The cloud addition and sharpening worked; the log removal was inconsistent across attempts. When you're satisfied with the result, you save it as a new file, with the original untouched, and if you save it in ON1's native format, the restored image sits on a layer above the original so you can continue editing.

Where Restore AI runs into trouble is with faces and wildlife. Morganti shows examples where the tool changes a person's facial features enough that they become unrecognizable, which is a known limitation of face recovery technology across the industry. ON1 includes a Face Recovery slider to blend back the original face, but as Morganti notes, it doesn't always get you where you want to be. He also tests it on a soft, washed-out zoo shot taken through thick plexiglass at an angle, and while Restore AI improves the image, it distorts the animal's features in ways that misrepresent what the subject actually looked like. For that kind of work, he points out that manual tools like Tack Sharp AI and Dynamic Contrast will still get you better and more accurate results.

Check out the video above for the full rundown from Morganti, including his side-by-side before-and-after comparisons and his honest take on where this tool earns its place in a workflow and where it doesn't.