DON'T use the auto-enhance button on phone apps, nearly wrecked grandma's wedding photo

I was cleaning up a 1954 photo from my grandma's wedding in Cleveland, and the auto-enhance on my free app turned her white dress into a blue blob and erased my grandpa's face details. I tried every setting for 2 hours before I found the manual brightness and contrast sliders in the same app, which took maybe 15 minutes and kept all the grain. The auto feature also added weird purple spots around the edges that I had to clone out with a free browser tool called Photopea. Anyone else have an app that ruined a scan before you could undo it, or is it just me?

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the_jake1mo ago

So did the app have an undo button and you just didn't notice it before, or was it one of those that saves over the original the second you tap enhance? Because I feel like there's a huge difference between "I got caught by a bad feature" and "my app deleted the photo before I could even check what it did." Also, the purple spots thing sounds like a color profile mismatch, did you happen to shoot in RAW or was it a straight JPEG from the scanner? I've seen that happen when the app tries to guess white balance on old film grain.