A Crease Running Straight Through a Face

The photograph

A black and white photograph of two women, mother and daughter by the look of it, taken outdoors against a panelled wall.

The damage

A deep crease had broken the paper fibres in a jagged line down the right of the frame, running directly through the older woman's face — across her cheek, mouth and jaw. Smaller creases branched off it. Where a fold breaks the fibres like this, the emulsion lifts along the line and the detail underneath is genuinely lost, not just hidden.

The work

Facial repair is a question of anatomy as much as technique. The undamaged side of her face provides the reference: the line of the jaw, the shape of the mouth, the fall of the light. I rebuilt across the crease using that, then checked the result against the daughter's features, since related faces share structure. Both were then colourised with matching skin tones so nothing about the repaired side reads differently from the rest.

This was a torn and cracked photo restoration job — see more on torn and cracked photo restoration.