A Portrait Recovered from Water Staining
This is the before and after I show people who think their photograph is too far gone.
Drag the handle to compare the original with the restored version.
The photograph
A portrait of a young boy in a school jumper and tie. By the time it reached me the subject was barely identifiable.
The damage
The print had been wet and dried badly. Brown and orange tide marks covered most of the frame, the paper had cockled into ridges, and hard fold lines crossed the image in both directions. In the original you can make out an eye, part of a nose and very little else.
The work
Staining sits above the image rather than in it, which is why water damage often gives such a dramatic result — the photograph underneath is frequently intact. The staining was lifted area by area, the cockling flattened digitally, and the fold lines rebuilt. What emerged had enough surviving detail to reconstruct the face properly. Finished as a clean black and white print rather than colourised, which suited the original.
This was a water damaged photo restoration job — see more on water damaged photo 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.
