Restoring an old photo, and where it stops
Scratches, tears, missing corners and forty years of fading all come back now. Faces don't come back — they get guessed, and the guess is the whole reason you were doing this.
There's a box, or a folder called scans_final_2. The photographs in it were taken by people who
weren't trying to make art, and most of them have been in a drawer since someone died.
Restoration used to mean paying a retoucher by the hour, which meant it happened to about three photographs per family. That constraint is gone. The interesting question is no longer whether a damaged photo can be rescued — it's what "rescued" should mean when the tools will happily invent the missing part.
What can actually be restored now?
Almost all of the damage, and reliably.
Scratches and creases across skin and clothing. Tears and missing corners. Heavy fading and the orange shift that thirty years in a drawer puts on colour prints. Grain, noise, and the softness of a bad flatbed scan. Black-and-white brought to colour, if you want that.
None of this is exotic anymore and none of it is a service you have to go and buy separately. It is genuinely the case that the box in the cupboard is now recoverable in an afternoon.
Then why do restored photos sometimes look wrong?
Because faces aren't restored. They're guessed.
Everything above is repair: the model has surrounding information and fills a gap consistent with it. A face is different — there's very little redundancy in one, so when detail is missing the model reconstructs a plausible face rather than that face. The result is technically flawless and subtly not your grandmother. Slightly younger. Slightly symmetrical. A different set to the mouth.
This is well documented and it's the current state of the art rather than a bad tool. One restoration release this year was widely written up for turning family photographs into uncanny, over-smoothed versions of the people in them. The failure is specific and it always lands in the same place: the part you care about.
How do you know if the face survived?
Someone who knew them looks at it. That's the only test there is.
Not "does it look like a good photo" — it will. The question is whether the specific person is still in there: the asymmetry, the heaviness around the eyes, the thing their face did that nobody photographed on purpose. People who knew them detect a substitution instantly and usually can't say what changed.
If nobody living can make that call, treat the restoration as a nice picture rather than as a record, and be careful about presenting it as the latter.
What do you do when the face doesn't survive?
Stop restoring it and redraw it.
This is the move most people don't know they have, and it inverts the problem. A portrait — flat colour, heavy line, a single-colour drawing of just the head — is built from the structure of a face rather than from its missing pixels. The likeness travels in the things a drawing can carry faithfully: the shape of the jaw, the hairline, the particular set of the brows, the glasses, the gap in the teeth.
A guessed photographic face fails because it claims to be a record and isn't. A drawing never claimed to be one, so it's free to be recognisable instead of accurate — which, for a face somebody loved, is the higher standard.
It also means a badly damaged photo isn't a lesser starting point. It's a reference, and a reference only has to carry the information.
Does the damage have to go at all?
Often it shouldn't.
There's a strong reflex to return a photograph to how it looked new, and on something you'll wear it usually makes the piece worse. The crease across the corner, the orange cast, the rounded 1970s border — those are why the image reads as old, and reading as old is doing most of the emotional work. Restore it to pristine digital colour and you get a photograph that could have been taken last week.
The damage worth removing is the damage that sits on a face — a scratch through an eye, a stain across a head — because that kind stops the photo doing its job. Everything else is patina, and patina is evidence.
Which photo is worth doing?
The one already being reached for, and the quality of it stopped mattering.
That's the part worth sitting with. The old advice was to hunt for the best-preserved photograph — sharp, well-lit, undamaged — because the process could only work with a good original. Redrawing removed that filter. A blurry, badly-lit, half-torn picture of someone at a kitchen table now produces the same clean result as a studio portrait, because what's being used is the information, not the emulsion.
So the selection question stopped being technical. What's left is which one means something.
How do I get one made?
Upload the scan or the photograph at JustOG — the original, not a photo of a screen. Drag the crop frame until it sits where you want, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.
Designs other people have published are in the shop.
The scratches come back. The face is a decision.