A photograph is time you can hold.
Every family keeps a drawer of photographs no one dares to throw away. Epoha exists for that drawer: to take the faded, scratched, folded prints and carefully return what they hold — the light of a day, the room, the face.
Three things we will not bend.
Faces are protected in the instructions
Every face goes into the restoration with written rules about what may not change, and a single face goes in with a close-up of itself as a reference. You see the result next to your original before paying: if the person has drifted, run it again or pay nothing.
Honesty about what this is
A restored photo is an AI reconstruction of the original, not a recovered negative. We say so plainly, on this site and next to every result.
Your photos stay yours
Photos are processed only to produce your restoration. They are not used to train models.
Who is behind this
Epoha is run by one person: Yevhen Kravchenko, a sole proprietor registered in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. The full registration details are on the privacy page, because a service that asks for your family photographs should be findable in a register, not only on a landing page.
The before-and-after pairs on this site are our own restorations of photographs we have the right to publish: a few from the family album of the person who runs Epoha, others from an earlier project of his that he has the right to publish, and the Library of Congress pairs, which are public domain and credited under each pair. Photographs uploaded to Epoha are never shown here, no matter how good the result looks.
The instruction was measured, not guessed
What the model is told to do went through thirteen versions, compared on the same photographs, and the choice between them was made by measurement rather than by which output looked nicer. Face similarity was scored against the original on our test photographs; a version that made people better-looking but less recognizable was rejected, twice.
One finding decided the whole approach. Asking for a beautiful, sharp, modern-looking photograph gets one — and it is a photograph of somebody else. Everything in the current instruction is arranged around the opposite: repair the paper, and leave the person exactly as the film recorded them.
What we know it cannot do
- Group photographs: on more than one face, likeness does not hold. Three unrelated instructions and two reference strategies failed the same way.
- A face that is only a few pixels wide: it comes back cleaner, never sharper. There is nothing there to recover.
- The true color of anything: a black-and-white negative never recorded it. Color is a plausible reading, not a document.
- A photograph nobody took: no missing arm, no second half of a torn group, no background that was never in the frame.
- A wall-sized print: the file comes back about 1,400 pixels on the long side.
See what your photograph holds.
Upload a scan, look at the restored result, and decide. You pay only after you have seen it.