ON1 Photo RAW Max 2026.4’s Restore AI process is truly remarkable

I’ve always been pretty sceptical of AI photo enhancement tools as many of them seem to be either ineffective or over processed and artificial-looking. The Restore AI process in ON1 Photo RAW Max 2026.4 has completely changed my mind.

It does three rather remarkable things. First, it removes spots, scratches and creases almost as if they’d never been there. Second, it upscales object in the scene to a 4K UHD resolution even when the original scans are half that width, i.e. typical scans of small prints from an ordinary multifunction printer/scanner. Third, it colorises old black and white photos with a realistic and sympathetic color palette that looks authentic and of its time, but also brings the past back to life.

I am impressed.

I’ve seen some comments about the face enhancement, and ON1 does seem to be acknowledging this as a work in progress, and it’s true that with some of my worst and blurriest examples it did recreate faces that had been changed and did not offer a perfect likeness.

Now this may not be much of an issue if you are restoring photos of people and scenes you don’t personally know, but it is disconcerting in photos of family members and ancestors. It doesn’t happen all the time, only when the original image is quite poor and the AI has to make an extra-large leap of faith to create sharp and detailed facial features.

There is an answer. The Restore AI panel has a Face Recovery section which you can expand to show an Adjust Faces button. When you click this, each face in the scene is identified with a green marquee, and. there’s a slider underneath which you can used to adjust the effect. By default it’s set to maximum, but as you drag it down to zero there’s less adjustment to your subject’s features and very often this will restore their likeness without losing too much of the AI’s other enhancements.

There is one thing that might leave you puzzled. As soon as you start the Restore AI process it will prompt you for an export filename and location. This doesn’t seem to be a bug. When you carry out the restoration process, it will prompt you for an export location again. When you’re done, you’ll find both the ‘before’ and ‘after’ versions saved at this location.

Not every feature in ON1 Photo RAW is stellar (I don’t rate the HDR tools, for example), but Restore AI is pretty extraordinary.

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