# 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.

August 16, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/restore-an-old-photo

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](/shop).

The scratches come back. The face is a decision.