Emulsion Loss Across a Child's Face
The hardest kind of damage to repair is the kind where the image layer itself has gone. This one had lost a great deal of it.
Drag the handle to compare the original with the restored version.
The photograph
A colour portrait of a young girl, probably 1970s or 1980s, that had been stored somewhere damp and warm for a long time.
The damage
The emulsion had blistered and flaked away in large patches, leaving bright gold and white voids across her forehead, cheek and hair, with more loss down the right edge. The remaining image had gone brown and grainy. Roughly a third of the face was simply not there any more.
The work
Where detail is genuinely gone it has to be rebuilt from what survives, and faces allow that because they are symmetrical. Her intact left side gave me the reference for the damaged right: the shape of the brow, the line of the hairline, the fall of the fringe. Each void was filled and blended, then the whole portrait was tonally rebalanced and finished against a clean backdrop. This is the point where I am most careful to keep the child recognisable rather than merely plausible.
This was a mould and damp damage restoration job — see more on mould and damp damage restoration.
| Service level | Advanced repair |
| Price band | £15–£25 |
| Turnaround | 2 days |
Other Restorations
Torn Baby Portrait Rebuilt from Fragments
One of the most damaged photographs I have worked on, and proof that a print in this condition is not beyond saving.
A Colour Print Lost Under a Yellow Cast
Colour prints from the 1970s and 1980s fail in a very particular way, and it looks far worse than it actually is.
An Edwardian Child Portrait in Colour
Seeing a child from a hundred years ago in colour is the moment most clients tell me they had not expected.
Have a photograph like this?
Send me a scan or a clear phone photo. I will tell you honestly what can be recovered, and what it will cost, within three hours.
