Pinin vs AIease: AI Photo Restoration Compared (2026)

Posted on Nov 3 • Originally published at blog.pinin.ai

A scratched print is an ill-posed input. CodeFormer, presented at NeurIPS 2022, makes the point precisely: one degraded image admits countless plausible clean versions, and the authors built an adjustable dial that trades fidelity for visual polish. That dial exists because the tension is real, and the prettier the output, the further it can drift from the original.

For anyone building or evaluating a restoration pipeline, the interesting part is what happens at the edges. A soldier with a crease through his shoulder is a local inpainting problem. A missing face is not, and a general model will still return something plausible. The engineering question is where the pipeline refuses to guess, and what it does instead. That refusal, and the handoff that follows it, is the part worth reading.

A side-by-side look at what happens when a scratched, faded print goes through a dedicated AI photo restorer.

The short answer: Pinin fits anyone repairing old family photographs who wants the original face kept, whole-album uploads and a price tied to each photo. AIease fits anyone who wants one inexpensive subscription that covers restoration along with headshots, video effects, image generation and the rest of a large editing catalog. Both give you a way to start without paying.

Somewhere in your house is a drawer of photographs nobody digitized. A grandmother's wedding portrait, faded the color of weak tea. A soldier with a crease through his shoulder. A beach scene from 1974 gone the color of weak tea.

You search for a fix and find two tools wearing the same label: AI photo restoration. One exists only to restore old pictures. The other is an everything-app with more than twenty tools, of which restoration is one. The difference decides whether your aunt's face survives the process.

This comparison covers features, colorization, batch work, pricing, privacy and a test you can run on your own scans. We run the blog at Pinin, so we have a stake in the outcome. Every price below comes from the vendors' own pages, every AIease claim points to AIease's own words or published reviews, and where AIease wins, we say so. The three-photo test at the end hands the final verdict to your pictures, not our marketing.

"Repair this damaged photo" sounds like one instruction. For a model, it is a request with no single correct answer. A cheek erased by a scratch could be rebuilt thousands of plausible ways, and only one of them is the person you knew.

The problem has a name: ill-posed. CodeFormer, presented at NeurIPS 2022, shows that a single degraded input admits countless plausible clean versions, and its authors built an adjustable dial trading fidelity for visual polish. The dial exists because the tension is real: the prettier the result, the further it can drift from the original.

The drift shows up in practice. A 2025 study with researchers from the Beijing Institute of Technology and the Australian National University stress-tested GPT-4o on restoration-style tasks and found pixel-level structural fidelity problems, including shifted proportions and altered details even when the output looked convincing at a glance. Android Authority documented a stranger failure: asked to "restore" images that were blank or unrecoverable, ChatGPT and Gemini invented complete scenes rather than admitting there was nothing to work from. A general model always produces something plausible; plausible is not the same as yours.

Pinin's namesake faced a harder version of the same problem in paint. When Giuseppina "Pinin" Brambilla Barcilon began work on Leonardo's The Last Supper in 1978, about 17.5 percent of the 45 square meter mural was missing. She refused to invent replacements for what Leonardo never painted, accepted visible gaps where the evidence ran out, and led the 21-year project that ended when the mural reopened on May 28, 1999.

A family print deserves the same discipline at a fraction of the scale. Your grandfather's jaw should stay his jaw. The diagram below shows the fork every restorer faces: listen to the original, or overwrite it with something tidier.

A dedicated restorer runs every photo through the same fidelity-first pipeline. A generalist suite shares its attention, and its credits, across everything it sells.

That distinction, fidelity as the product versus fidelity as one feature among twenty, is the lens for the rest of this article.

Match the tool to the job. Four situations cover nearly everyone reading this.

Choose Pinin if the photos are old, damaged and irreplaceable. The service does one thing: repair scratches, tears, stains and fade, colorize black and white, deblur and upscale, all built to keep the original features. Pricing is per photo, album mode handles a shoebox in one upload, and a human team takes the cases no algorithm should guess at.

Choose AIease if restoration is a side task inside a bigger content workflow. You also want headshots, AI video effects, hairstyle experiments and image generation, and you would rather pay one small monthly bill for all of it. The Pro plan's roughly $4.99 a month undercuts Pinin's subscription, provided you actually spend credits across the catalog.

Choose a human restorer if the photo has torn or missing pieces. No model can bring back a face the print no longer holds. Pinin's own service for manual restoration quotes those jobs to human artists, with a free estimate within 72 hours.

Choose both for a one-hour experiment. Free entry on both sides makes a head-to-head test cost nothing. The six-step protocol near the end of this article shows you how.

AIease is an online AI photo and video suite with more than twenty tools: the photo restoration tool, a dedicated colorizer, a general enhancer, background removal, headshots, hairstyle changes, AI baby portraits, video effects and image generation. Restoration is marketed as "Fix Scratches," promising repair of scratches, tears, spots and fading plus detail sharpening.

The model is credits plus a low monthly plan: a free tier for limited test runs, Pro from roughly $4.99 a month. Every tool draws from the same allowance, so the price stays affordable partly because credits stretch across video, portraits and everything else.

Credit for where credit is due: AIease covers a remarkable amount of ground for the money, its colorizer is a real dedicated tool rather than a slider, and its batch editing on premium plans is genuine. If your week involves social content and the occasional old photo, that breadth is worth real money.

Three things. First, focus: restoration shares engineering attention, credit value and a generative pipeline with more than twenty other features, and AIease does not publish a per-photo turnaround for the restore tool or a stated licensing position for restored images. Second, fidelity: the company does not publicly document how the restoration model handles face preservation or hallucinated details, so you are trusting the output without a stated method. Third, dead ends: there is no human option behind the AI. When a print has a missing face or a torn corner, a suite with twenty tools still hands you back an automated guess. Pinin's approach to those cases is described further down.

Pinin is an AI photo restoration service built around one job. It takes its name from Giuseppina "Pinin" Brambilla Barcilon, the Italian conservator born in Monza in 1925 who spent 21 years restoring Leonardo's Last Supper, and the product follows her rule: recover what was there instead of repainting what looks nice. The full background is on the story of Pinin page.

Four steps. Sign in with a magic link from your inbox, no password to invent and no card to enter. Every new account starts with one credit, so the first restoration is free. Your photo runs through Pinin's dedicated restorer and returns in 1 to 3 minutes; the credit is deducted only when the run succeeds, and uploads and previews cost nothing.

Behind the scenes: GDPR-compliant infrastructure, uploads and processing caches deleted within 30 days, payments through Stripe, and a money-back guarantee if a print is too degraded for the AI to salvage.

Honesty first, about ourselves. Pinin does one thing, so headshots or video mean a second subscription. It is slower than instant-fix apps, at 1 to 3 minutes per photo. Pack credits expire after a year, subscription credits reset monthly with no rollover, and packs are personal use only, so commercial work needs a subscription. The AI also has a ceiling: severe damage with missing pieces goes to the manual restoration team, where human artists quote free within 72 hours and deliver in 5 to 10 business days from an estimated $10 for low-damage photos. Pinin would rather route that work to people than let a model invent a face.

The table below sticks to what each vendor states on its own pages. Where AIease publishes nothing, the table says so rather than guessing.

Pinin makes face preservation its central claim: models trained on damaged inputs, period signatures respected, original geometry kept. AIease promises natural-looking repairs without documenting a face-preservation method. No independent benchmark compares the two, so run the landmark check from the test section. If a tool gives your grandfather a new smile, ten seconds of zooming will tell you.

Both have real colorizers, which already beats chatbots. Pinin says its model is trained around vintage photographs and period-appropriate color; AIease's colorizer shares the suite's credits. Honest answer: colorization is inference either way. A crimson gown and a green one can share identical gray, and only a relative who remembers can settle it, so check skin tones and clothing against family memory before framing anything.

On paper, AIease cannot be judged because it publishes no per-photo time, while Pinin lists 1 to 3 minutes. In practice, speed matters less than flow. Pinin's album mode takes 30 to 100 photos in one batch depending on plan, so a shoebox uploads once. With a suite, you manage each photo as its own task and share the credit bill with every other tool you used that week.

Pinin charges per restored photo, and the math is public: one credit is one photo, deducted only on success, and annual billing saves 20 percent. The chart converts every option into a per-photo figure.

Per-photo cost drops from $1.20 for the smallest pack to $0.18 on the Da Vinci plan.

On the pricing page, the subscription tiers are Giotto at $12 a month for 30 restorations, Botticelli at $32 for 100 and Da Vinci at $72 for 400, with enterprise from $299 a month. A 100-photo month costs $32 on Botticelli against $70 in single credits, and subscribers add a commercial license, priority processing and larger batch ceilings.

AIease charges about $4.99 a month on the low end for a shared allowance. That bill is genuinely cheaper, and it is also buying twenty tools, not restoration specifically. Run one photo first and see how much of the allowance it consumes, because a credit that also pays for video generation has no fixed price per restoration.

The fair reading: AIease wins on breadth per dollar if you will use the other nineteen tools. Pinin wins on predictable per-photo math if photos are the whole job.

Pinin states GDPR compliance, deletes uploads and processing caches within 30 days, and answers email within 48 hours on Giotto, 24 hours on Botticelli, with an account manager on Da Vinci. AIease publishes suite-wide privacy terms but no retention period specific to restoration uploads, so read its policy before sending anything irreplaceable. Ask through Pinin support or AIease's own help pages if the answer is not in writing.

The tool is half the outcome. Your scan and your habits are the other half, whichever product you pick.

No model can conjure pixels the scan never captured. The Library of Congress digital preservation team recommends 300 dpi/ppi for prints of standard sizes, 5x7 and 8x10 among them, and more if enlargement is planned. Pinin's scanning guide covers the same routine: wipe the glass, free the print of dust, keep it flat, and disable any auto-enhance in the driver. For brittle prints you would rather not press down, an even, glare-free phone capture is a workable fallback.

Yes. Enlarging a damaged photo gives you a bigger damaged photo, so repair first. Pinin folds repair and upscaling into one pass up to 4K; with a suite, fix scratches, check the face, then upscale separately so you can see what each stage added.

Set the original scan beside the result at full zoom and inspect five landmarks:

Treat every colorized photo as an educated guess dressed as fact. Brightness survives in a black and white print; color does not. Ask the eldest relative what color that dress really was, check uniforms and flags against period references, and file the monochrome original next to the colorized copy. Both Pinin and AIease produce plausible color; family memory is the only accuracy check that counts.

When corners have torn away, when a face is gone entirely, when emulsion has flaked off in patches. Barcilon confronted a Last Supper missing 17.5 percent of its paint and declined to invent what Leonardo never painted; a model asked to fill that gap produces fiction. Pinin's manual service exists for these cases; a suite has no equivalent exit door.

No vendor page settles this comparison. Your own scans can, in about an hour.

For quick fixes, yes: it repairs scratches, colorizes monochrome prints and sharpens detail, and the free tier makes a first test painless. Two caveats matter. The restore tool shares a single credit allowance with a catalog of more than twenty features instead of being the product's whole purpose, and AIease publishes neither turnaround times nor a face-preservation method for it. Casual touch-ups, fine; irreplaceable prints, verify closely.

Every new account gets one free restoration, with magic-link sign-in and no credit card. After that, credit packs start at $5.99 for 5 photos and subscriptions start at $12 a month on annual billing for 30 restorations. Details are on the FAQ page.

Pinin runs $0.18 to $1.20 per restored photo. AIease's Pro plan starts around $4.99 a month for credits shared across the whole catalog — cheaper monthly, but with no fixed per-restoration price, since the same credits also pay for video and image generation. Run one photo in each and read the real cost.

It can. Any generative model fills damaged areas with plausible detail, and plausible is not the same as accurate. Compare eye spacing, nose, hairline and jaw against the original scan at full zoom. Pinin is built to keep the original features and backs results with a satisfaction guarantee: a disappointed result gets re-processed or the credit refunded.

Both offer dedicated colorizers, which already beats most chatbots. Pinin says its model is tuned for vintage photographs and period-appropriate color; AIease's colorizer is one tool in the wider suite. The decisive test is personal: run the same portrait through both and ask a relative whether the colors match what they remember.

Small tears and gaps can be inferred from surrounding detail. A missing face or torn corner cannot be recovered, only invented. Pinin sends those photos to its manual restoration team — free quote within 72 hours, delivery in 5 to 10 business days.

Check retention and compliance claims before uploading. Pinin states GDPR compliance, deletes uploads and processing caches within 30 days, and takes payment through Stripe. For AIease, read the suite privacy policy; we found no restoration-specific retention commitment. Keep your originals offline either way.

Pinin's subscriptions include a commercial license; credit packs are personal use only. AIease states no licensing terms on its restoration page, so confirm in its terms of service before selling restored files.

Run the album in batches. Pinin's album mode takes 30 to 100 photos per batch by plan, with unlimited bulk upload on enterprise; AIease batches on premium plans, drawing from the shared allowance. Count your album first: the math diverges fast past 30 pictures.

This comparison sits in a series. If you want other dedicated restoration tools, see our looks at RestorePhotos and Imgkits, or the general-purpose Magica workspace. Each review follows the same structure and the same three-photo test, so the conclusions stay comparable.

Pinin is the pick for irreplaceable old photos, with per-photo pricing, album mode, human restoration for the worst damage and a free first run. AIease is the pick if you want one cheap subscription covering restoration plus headshots, video and image generation. Both start free, so test one photo in each before you spend anything.

The first restoration costs nothing. Sign in with a magic link, upload one scratched or faded print, and let your own eyes decide — the jawline and the hairline will tell you fast. No card, no password.

Still deciding? Look through the before and after examples, weigh the plans and credits, or write to the team through support. And if your print has torn or missing pieces, ask the manual restoration artists for a quote instead of letting a model guess.

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