Photo Repair and Restore

Mounted or framed photos often get scratched when they fall off the wall and the glass breaks. The broken glass scratches the photo. If this happens to you carefully remove the glass and brush off any small bits.

When photos in frames get exposed to moisture they can stick to the glass. Damage can occur with amplified sun fading and water leaching out the colour. This stuck image is often discovered when the glass is accidentally broken. Fortunately, we can fix photos stuck to glass, even if the glass is broken.

 

For photos with cracks or scratches, we use “healing” and “patching” tools to take information from a nearby part of the image and fill in the gaps. Even photos that have been completely torn or shredded into pieces can be put back together and restored to their original state.

Writing on the back of photos with ink can mean it transfers to photos underneath. It is always best to use a soft pencil. Leaving photos on flat surfaces can mean they get damaged by drink stains and not everyone remembers to remove the photo when redecorating and paint splatters can ruin a photo. All of these issues can be restored but do look after your photo.! If you find this happens to you we can help.

Water damaged photos can be repaired by reconstructing stained areas and filling in the details. Other reference photos can be useful for a successful restore. See this blog post on how we restore water damaged photos. No one can predict when a fire can happen but if it does and your precious memories get damaged we can help. Smoke and burn marks can be fixed and restored in a similar way to water-damaged photos.

Old board based photos are very sensitive to moisture damage. If after exposure to water they are left to dry out in excessive heat the emulsion or surface of the photo can simply flake off. Photo restoration can help restore flaked emulsion.

Occasionally the worst happens and light gets into your camera. Fixing light leaks can be very time consuming to do, anything worse than this and your image may not be recoverable. If you wish to try fixing your photo yourself, you can watch a course on colour casts and fading.

Badly faded photos can be restored by painting in shadows and highlights to increase contrast. In extreme cases, we may first restore the image to a good black and white condition and then rebuild the colour by manually painting in multiple tinted layers over different parts of the image.

Sellotape seemed like a miracle invention for sticking a photo back together. With age, it leaves crackly, brittle, yellow-brown sellophane on your photos.

Very old black and white images can suffer from “Silvering”. This is where the silver nitrate in the developer shows on the surface of dark areas as a shiny blue tint, sometimes obscuring the details. This can be fixed in most cases.

For photos with missing pieces, we can either recreate those pieces from existing parts of the image, use another image as a donor, or redraw the details back in manually.

Large format negatives or slides have a bigger area that can be damaged by heat or moisture causing wrinkles. A severe type of damage that can be quite upsetting. Fear not this is repairable as we can repair wrinkled large format negatives.

Daguerreotypes are special photos indeed. They are fragile and normally come with their own case. Even this protective case can become compromised and cause the image to deteriorate. We can fix damaged Daguerreotypes 

Photos made on tin are called TinTypes and still exist today. If you have one that is bent or scratched, we can fix it using digital techniques.