Small marks are the easy case. Erase and Retouch clear a speck or a short line, and Noise Reduction calms film grain that turned blotchy in the scan. On a print with a dozen dust spots this takes a few minutes, and the result goes straight into whatever you are designing.

Creases are harder. A fold line crosses skin, hair and background in one stroke, and each part needs a different texture to hide it. Tears add second problem. Part of the picture is gone, so the tool has to guess what was there. Dedicated tools handle this in two ways. Healing brushes in Photoshop or GIMP sample texture from nearby and paint it over the damage. Photo Retoucher detects scratches, fills only the damaged pixels and then lets you touch up the rest by hand.

Fading is a separate job. The brightness and contrast sliders recover a washed-out print well enough for a slideshow.
Before you decide, run two prints trough Canva: one lightly faded portrait and one with a crease through a face. If both come back clean, Canva is enough for your box. If the crease still shows at 100% zoom, you know what to expect from the rest of the damaged pile.

Where does the Canva resolution enhancer fall short on badly damaged or low-resolution scans?

Guideflow's roundup of photo restoration software is blunt about Canva, saying "It's not a specialist restorer, so heavily damaged photos may need more." A vendor's Canva photo enhancer review reaches the same line from another side. It rates Canva fine for everyday improvements, weaker on heavily damaged or very low-resolution images, and behind dedicated software on advanced AI upscaling.

Wallet-size prints scanned at low settings are the common trap. A search for a canva resolution enhancer usually means a small scan that has to get bigger. If you wonder how to make an image higher resolution in Canva, making the file larger is the easy part. Adding detail the scan never captured is the hard part, so rescan the print at higher resolution first if you still have it. If the print is gone, a dedicated upscaler does more, and our guide on how to convert a picture to HD quality compares the options.

Blur is the second limit. A sharpen slider adds edge contrast, which makes a slightly soft print look crisper and a truly blurry one look noisy. Motion blur and the soft focus of an old box camera need deblurring models; for that case, see how to fix blurry photos.
Volume is the third. We found no batch mode for restoring a folder of scans in Canva, so each photo is its own round of edits. Ten photos is an evening. A shoebox of 200 is a month of evenings.

Will a restored photo look fake or true to the original?

In a hands-on test of an AI restorer, Fstoppers found that on some photos "it made a real mess of faces in a way that makes a soft original more appealing." The usual failures are skin smoothed into plastic, eyes that look painted on, and a face sharpened while the hair and clothes around it stay soft.

The source scan sets the limit. When a face is only a few dozen pixels wide, there is little real detail left, and any model fills gap with a guess.

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Colorizing raises a different question. It adds colors the camera never recorded, so many family historians keep the black and white scan as the record and treat a colorized copy as an illustration. Photo Retoucher can colorize black and white photos too, and where the damage is heavy it sometimes guesses a color wrong, so check skin and clothing before you share the result.

Is Canva photo restoration free, or do you need Pro?

The plan question matters most for a one-off job. A common case is a relative with about 50 prints who wants them done once and has no use of a yearly subscription afterwards. For that person, the cost of a month or two of Pro and the time per photo both count.

Here is how the other routes charge. Remini runs on subscriptions. Photoshop comes with a Creative Cloud plan. GIMP costs nothing and asks for hours instead. Photo Retoucher has a free trial that processes photos and shows the result, and saving the restored image needs a license. Our product page says "free download", and that word refers to the trial, so plan on a license if you want to keep the files.
Canva changes its plans and app permissions from time to time. Open the app listing in your own account and check which plan it asks for before uploading a whole album.

The five tools below are ranked by how safely they repair a damaged scan. Canva sits third: good for light work, outclassed on heavy damage.

1. Photo Retoucher - best for damaged scans and whole folders on Windows

People who reach for Photo Retoucher usually have a box of scanned prints with real damage. Think scratches and mold spots on faded prints, with faces that were tiny to begin with. It runs on Windows and processes photos on your PC, so family scans stay off other people's servers. AI restores faces, removes scratches and dust by filling only the damaged pixels, reduces noise, colorizes monochrome prints and removes unwanted objects. Batch mode runs a whole folder, and retouching brushes handle the spots you want to finish by hand.

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If the job is only making a folder of small images bigger, our batch image upscaler covers that on its own.

Verdict: Choose Photo Retoucher if your scans have real damage or arrive by the folder, and you work on Windows.
Our take comes with a disclosure, since we make this one. For this job its strength is the scratch fill that leaves undamaged pixels alone, and that reliability point decided the ranking.

2. Adobe Photoshop - best for full manual control

Photoshop is what professional retouchers open first. It pairs healing and clone tools with a Photo Restoration filter among its Neural Filters, so you can run the AI pass and then fix what it missed by hand. The trade-off is time and skill. People who try to restore a photo in Photoshop without training often describe it as neither intuitive nor easy, and the experts who answer them agree that restoration takes practice. Speed is the other cost: Shotkit's comparison of AI photo restorers found that Photoshop's Photo Restoration "works slower than most other software" the reviewer tried.

Verdict: Choose Photoshop if you already pay for it or restore photos often enough to learn it properly.
Our take: we would skip it for a single shoebox of family prints. It pays off the day a torn portrait needs two hours of careful cloning.

3. Canva - best for light touch-ups inside a design

Canva fits faded prints that are on their way into a birthday card, a memorial slideshow or a social post. The sliders fix color and contrast in a minute, Retouch and Erase take care of small marks, and the restoration app is there when you want more than sliders. A photo digitization service that writes about it says Canva "can remove many minor imperfections", which is a fair summary of where it sits.

Verdict: Choose Canva if the photos are lightly worn and you are making a card or slideshow from them anyway.
Could Canva handle a crease running through a face? Nothing published shows it doing that well, which is why we would test that exact print before trusting it with the rest of the album.

4. GIMP - best free alternative for manual repair

GIMP is a free, open-source editor for Windows, macOS and Linux. For scanned prints the Heal tool samples texture from a nearby area and blends it over a scratch or a speck. Everything happens on your computer. Standard install has no AI face repair, so a blurry face stays as blurry as the scan.

Verdict: Choose GIMP if your budget is zero and you have evenings to spare.
Our take: a good fit for a handful of special prints. For a whole album we would budget several weekends.

5. Remini - best for blurry faces on a phone

Remini is a mobile AI enhancer built around faces. Lex AI summed it up in their review, saying "It doesn't just smooth things over, you know, it reconstructs what should be there based on millions of image patterns." That reconstruction is both the selling point and the risk. A review summary on Tools for Humans counts subscriptions you can't easily avoid and paywalls that show up late among the complaints, and notes that the automatic results often look unnatural. Buyers also report results where the face got sharper while the rest of the picture stayed behind.

Verdict: Choose Remini if one blurry face matters more than the rest of the photo, and keep the original next to the result.

The faces come out sharper than the scan allows. Fine for a quick share. For a family record it is a problem.

Canva is enough

You are putting together a memorial slideshow or an anniversary card, and the prints are faded with a few specks. Canva keeps restoration and layout in one place, and the free plan covers the sliders. Run the two-print test from above first; if the faces hold up at full size, stay in Canva.

Move to a dedicated restorer

You are the family archivist with 50 to 200 scans, some creased, some with mold spots, many with small faces from group shots. On Windows, Photo Retoucher handles the folder in batch. If you already pay for Adobe and want full control, Photoshop is the deeper tool. With no budget and plenty of patience, GIMP's Heal tool does the manual version. If you have a single photo and no Windows PC, start with old photo restoration online and see whether a browser tool is enough.

Skip automatic AI

You are researching family history, and the photo is evidence of who was there. Repair scratches and dust with a brush, leave faces as the scan shows them, and label any colorized or AI-sharpened copy as such.

Also considered

• Vmake is better known for AI enhancement of old video footage; its Canva review promotes its own tool and shows few examples on scanned prints
• Picwand is a browser tool whose Canva comparison contradicts itself, and we found no user reviews of Picwand itself
• Wondershare Repairit is built for corrupted image and video files, a different problem from a scratched print
• VideoProc Converter AI mangled some faces in the Fstoppers test cited above
• Snapseed, Picsart and similar phone editors often appear as Canva alternatives. This review covers browser and Windows tools for scanned prints

Sources

• Wikipedia: Digital photograph restoration gives background on manual and automated repair of scanned prints
• Library of Congress: Care, handling and storage of photographs explains how to keep the original prints safe after scanning