What can, and can't, be restored
An honest guide to what is recoverable from a damaged photograph, and where the limits genuinely lie.
Restoration has a reputation for magic, largely because the successful examples are the ones people share. It is worth being straightforward about where the real boundary sits, because it is not where most people assume.
Usually recoverable
Fading, yellowing and colour casts are routine. So are surface scratches, creases, dust, foxing and water spotting. Tears (even long ones through the middle of a print) can be rebuilt convincingly, because the information either side of the tear tells you what belongs in the gap.
Missing corners and edges are usually fine too. Backgrounds are forgiving: wallpaper, sky, grass and fabric all follow patterns that can be reconstructed without inventing anything meaningful.
Sometimes recoverable
Damage across a face is the interesting case. If one eye survives and the face is roughly symmetrical, a great deal can be rebuilt honestly. If both eyes are gone, anything I produce is a guess wearing a familiar expression, and a guess is not a photograph of your grandmother.
Severe blur is the same story. Camera shake and slight misfocus can often be improved. A photograph that was never sharp cannot be made sharp; detail that was not recorded cannot be recovered, whatever the software claims.
Not recoverable
Where the emulsion has lifted away from the paper, the image is simply gone in that area. Heavily mould-damaged prints, prints welded into old self-adhesive albums, and badly burnt photographs often fall here. So do very small prints enlarged well past what the original held: you can smooth them, but you cannot add information that was never there.
How I work
Send me a scan or a photograph of the print and I will tell you honestly what I expect to achieve before any money changes hands. If a picture is beyond sensible repair, I would rather say so than take the work and disappoint you at the end. The full detail of how restoration and colourisation work is set out separately, and where a whole box needs recovering it usually becomes a heritage album.
And one thing worth stressing: the original is always kept. Restoration produces a new file for printing. The print you sent stays exactly as it is, because it is the object your family has held for eighty years.
