Analyse the photo, and determine what needs to be fixed. This includes scratches and speckles, image defects, color problems, lighting problems, low quality or resolution, blur and more.

Remove scratches and speckles. This is done both manually with a brush in photoshop and with the aid of AI inpainting tools.

Separate the foreground and background, and apply specific manual adjustments to each. This includes sharpening, blurring, denoising and lighting fixes.

Fix color. While in some cases this just includes adjusting basic values, much of the time the image needs to be fully recolored. The colorization process starts with an AI tool, but it is more of a jumping off point as the entire color layer is then manually repainted in photoshop.

Upscale the image. This is usually done in layers, as certain models are optimized for different scenes. For example, one AI model is better at restoring outdoor landscapes, while another can better handle humans and faces. Sometimes this is completed with off-the-shelf upscaling programs, but more often than not, an open-source tool or custom-tweaked model is used.

Final compositing. This is the stage that makes images look good to the human eye, and brings all previous steps together. In this stage, custom color grades, lighting adjustments, sharpening or blurring, film grain and more are added.

Review the footage, and determine all the things that need to be fixed. This includes scratches and speckles, image defects, flickering, color problems, low quality or resolution, shaky video, blur and more.

Separate video into clips. With most videos, many scenes will be strung together into one long video. In order to give special attention to each scene, the video needs to be broken up into individual clips.

Upscale the video. Many AI tools are tested for each clip, and the best one is chosen by what looks the most natural. Everything is then processed, where the videos are ready for the resto of the editing.

Remove scratches and speckles. This is done partially with automatic tools, but in some cases each spot needs to be selected and inpainted.

Fix flickering. Nowadays, this is also done almost completely automatically.

Fix color. Professional color tools are used to bring everything back to a natural state. In some cases black & white footage can be colorized, but it is much harder to perform on video than images.

Stabilize the video. Automatic and manual tools are used to remove the shakiness from clips.

Final compositing. In this stage all the pieces come together. Masks add specific color and lighting adjustments to parts of the image, an overall grade is created, film grain is added, and final tweaks are applied.