Old photo restoration repairs the physical damage a print has collected over the decades — scratches, creases, stains and the slow fading of the emulsion — and then returns colour to the scene. The subject is not changed. What you receive is the photograph you already have, cleaned, steadied, and finished the way a careful hand-colourist would have finished it at the time.

What restoration repairs

Most damage on an old print is on the surface or in the chemistry, not in the image itself. The restoration works through the common kinds:

• Scratches and dust — the fine lines and specks from years in a drawer or an album sleeve.
• Creases and folds — the pale break lines where the paper was bent, including the ones that run across a face.
• Stains and foxing — water marks, tape residue, and the brown spotting that damp brings on.
• Silvering and fading — the metallic sheen in dark areas and the general loss of contrast as the print ages.
• Colour — black-and-white prints are coloured; faded colour prints have their original tones brought back.

What it never invents

A restoration is only worth keeping if it is still your photograph. So faces are repaired, never redrawn: a blurred face stays a little soft rather than becoming a sharper stranger. A missing corner is not filled in with a guess at the room. Nobody is added, removed or moved. Colour is kept conservative — plausible skin, hair and daylight rather than saturated invention — because a quiet result ages better on a wall than a loud one.

How to photograph or scan an old print

1. Take the print out of its frame or sleeve and lay it flat. A book on each edge holds a curled print down.
2. Use even daylight from a window, not direct sun. Turn the flash off; it puts a bright patch on the paper.
3. Hold the phone straight above the print and fill the frame with it, edges included.
4. If you have a scanner, scan at 600 dpi and save as JPG or PNG. A phone photo is fine if you do not.
5. Check the file is JPG, PNG or WebP and under 15 MB. HEIC from an iPhone needs converting first.

What you get

Upload the print and, in about a minute, you see one restored preview at 600 px with a watermark. That preview is free — one per visitor per day — and it needs no account. The private link to it closes 48 hours after upload.

If you keep it, the digital file is 2560 px on the long edge at the original proportions of your print, from €4.99. Canvas prints come in 20×25, 40×50 and 60×75 cm and follow the orientation of the photograph; framed canvases in 20×25, 40×50 and 60×80 cm (30×30 cm for square photographs), in Black, Dark wood or Natural wood, follow it too. Prints start at €69.99 with shipping included to 35 countries, take 3–5 business days to make, and are best allowed two weeks to arrive.

BeforeAfter

Compare before and after. Slide to reveal more of the after photograph.

Show her the photo in colour

The photographs that come through here usually belong to somebody else: the wedding picture from a shoebox, the one surviving portrait of a mother as a girl. Whoever owns it has looked at it a thousand times in grey and has never seen the dress.

You do not need the original to do this. A phone photo of the print, taken at their house, is enough, and the restored preview comes back in about a minute, so this is an evening rather than a project. The gift is the moment you show it to them.

What makes it something to hand over is the canvas. The photograph keeps its own proportions rather than being cropped square, prints start at €69.99 with shipping included and the digital file in the price, and at checkout you can send it straight to their address instead of your own.

Questions about restoration