Last month I gave a new Zoom lecture for a geneology club entitled "Preserving Your Ancestors' Pictures". It went into a lot of interesting subjects that most of the attendees were unaware of (many of which were touched upon in this blog post from 2018, and I also discussed data preservation techniques I wrote about in this blog post from 2014 about digital bit rot).
The last part of that talk showed off some of the new capabilities of generative AI programs (the same programs that will ultimately erode trust in what you see and poison all of the internet, making anything on the internet wholely untrustworthy.) But until that happens, you can use programs like Google's Nano Banana Pro or Remini.ai to clean up old images. Below are some impressive examples I gave from the talk (click on any image to view larger and sharper):
