Can a photo that is torn, cracked, scribbled on or half eaten away really be brought back? Often, yes, but how it is done matters as much as the result. The ten restorations below are the work of Michelle Spalding, a Colorado illustrator and graphic designer who repairs damaged family pictures in her spare time. She has taken many of her requests from r/estoration, a Reddit community where people post photos they cannot fix themselves, and the public radio show Endless Thread described her work there as pro bono.
What sets her apart is patience. Instead of leaning on one-click filters, she rebuilds damaged areas largely by hand in Photoshop, drawing on her art-school training in light, anatomy and perspective. Some photos have taken her upwards of 20 hours. Most of the originals here were the only surviving picture of someone: a mother who died young, a grandparent, a child who grew up long ago. That is why the work moves people, and also why it raises a fair question we look at near the end: how much of a restored face is recovered, and how much is skilled interpretation?
Case study: a cracked portrait with three generations
The first photograph gets the most detail, because Spalding documented each step. It shows a woman as a small child, held by her grandmother, with her grandfather beside them. It was the only picture she had of herself at that age and the only one of her grandparents.
The print had been folded and creased so many times that a web of white cracks ran across every face. Where the emulsion (the thin image-bearing layer on top of the paper) has flaked off, the information underneath is simply gone.
The finished restoration. The television set and patterned curtains in the background suggest a home photo from around the 1950s or 1960s. Notice that the background and clothing are left with their natural softness: the effort went where it counts, into the three faces.
The grandfather's face was the hardest part. Spalding's first pass lowers the harsh contrast along each tear and fills the cracks with tones sampled from neighbouring pixels. She explains that on faces she prefers to do this "manually by eye", because it leaves the largest number of undamaged pixels untouched.
On the left is the separate layer of grey fill she painted into the cracks; on the right, green marks every spot where emulsion is missing. Working on a separate layer means the original scan is never painted over, and the green map shows that the real loss is smaller than the tangled cracks make it look.
Here the yellow outlines mark the "critical" areas: parts of the eyes and mouth where lost detail shapes how a person actually looks. Damage elsewhere, on the forehead or cheeks, can be blended with careful dodging and burning (selectively lightening and darkening), but these small zones decide whether the man still looks like himself.
The dotted lines trace the big tears. Scanning a creased print can create false highlights and shadows along folds, so a restorer has to separate what was in the original scene from what the scanner lamp invented. Spalding says knowledge of skull and facial anatomy helps her shade the face so that it keeps a believable shape.
On the left, the reconstructed face before fine detail; on the right, the final version with features drawn in to suit the rest of the face. She is open that this last step cannot promise historical accuracy, only a result much closer to the real man than quick fixes would give. Her advice to other restorers is to save shortcuts for the background and work slowly on eyes, noses and mouths.
Removing hospital equipment from a newborn's photo
Not every request involves an old print. This is a recent photo of a newborn wearing a nasal tube and a medical sensor on the forehead, which parents of babies who spent time in neonatal care often have instead of a "first portrait".
The edited version removes the tape, tubing and sensor and rebuilds the skin, nostrils and lips underneath. It is retouching rather than restoration in the strict sense, since nothing was damaged; it gives the family a calm portrait while the original stays as a record of what the baby came through.
Portraits of mothers saved from loss
A client's only photo of her mother as a young woman
Almost the whole left side of this sepia portrait had peeled away, taking hair, background and part of the cheek with it. The style of the hair and collar suggests the 1940s.
Because the right side survived, the restorer could mirror hair texture and lighting across, then match the warm sepia tone over the whole print. Symmetry helps here, but a face is never perfectly symmetrical, so details such as the hairline still had to be judged by eye.
The only picture a man had of his mother
This is perhaps the most personal request in the set. The young woman died when her son was born, and this hand-tinted portrait was his only photograph of her. Someone had scrawled across it in red, and the surface had chipped around her mouth.
Ink scribbles are harder than they look, because the red sits on top of real detail and has to be taken out without flattening the skin tones beneath. The restored portrait keeps the soft colouring typical of hand-tinted studio photos of the mid-twentieth century.
Family groups and childhood photos
An early twentieth-century family portrait
A man with two children, probably a father with his son and daughter, photographed in the early 1900s. Creases, cracks and torn corners break across all three figures.
The repaired print shows how much of the original survived: the jacket weave, the boy's knitted collar and the girl's bobbed hair are all real detail once the cracks are filled. Rebuilding the missing corner and evening out the stains turns a fragile object into a portrait that can be printed again.
A favourite photo of an uncle, chewed by a cat
A smiling man carries a baby in a polka-dot outfit on his shoulders. The family cat had clawed and bitten the print, leaving shredded paper right across his face.
Colour snapshots from the 1980s and 1990s are often easier to restore than older prints because more of the scene survives and skin tones can be sampled from undamaged areas. The torn face was rebuilt to match the man's broad grin and the flash lighting of the original.
Emulsion loss on a little girl's portrait
Damp or heat can make emulsion bubble and flake. Here it lifted off across the girl's forehead, nose and chin, the very areas that carry her expression. It was the only photo of the subject as a child.
The restored face keeps her wide smile and the fine ribbing of her sweater. When this much of a face is missing, the shapes of the lips and nose are partly reconstructed from what remains around them, which is exactly the kind of interpretive work discussed below.
Shadows, fading and a splash of colour
A toddler hidden behind a large shadow
Not all damage is physical. A dark diagonal band, perhaps from a hand or an object between the lens and the boy, crosses this mid-century snapshot of a toddler climbing up to a bathroom sink.
Removing a shadow means rebalancing the exposure underneath it, not painting over it. The restored version brings back the boy's face, the tiled wall and the electrical outlet with consistent light.
A colourised version adds a green bathroom, blue dungarees and natural skin tones. Colourisation is always an interpretation: unless someone remembers or documented the real colours, the choices are informed guesses based on what was typical at the time.
The only photo of an ancestor as a child
Heavy staining and silvering had almost erased the left side of this boy's face. Old prints often develop this brown, mirror-like haze as the silver in the image migrates to the surface.
The repaired portrait gives back his light eyes, tousled curls and even skin. It remains a reconstruction of the most damaged side, but it allows descendants to see a face they otherwise would not have.
A sailor brought back in colour
A young sailor whose cap ribbon reads "H.M. Patrol Vessel", the form used by Britain's Royal Navy and some Commonwealth navies. The photo is cracked across his chest and face. Ribbons like this were often worn without a ship's name during the Second World War for security, although the exact date of this portrait is not known.
The repaired black-and-white version restores the square sailor's collar with its white stripes and the open, slightly amused expression of a long-lost relative.
Finally, colour: navy blue uniform, white undershirt and natural skin tones. For families researching a relative who served, a clean, colourised portrait can be the image that brings their story to life, while the original remains the historical record.
Repair or reconstruction? Keeping restorations honest
All of these photos fall somewhere on a scale. At one end is pure repair: removing dust, filling a scratch across a plain wall, using pixels that really existed nearby. At the other end is reconstruction: drawing a nose, an eye or a smile where the original information is gone. Both are valuable, but they are not the same thing.
Spalding's own method shows a good habit: work on separate layers, map exactly where the emulsion is missing, and treat the critical features with the most care. If you have family photos restored, a few simple steps help:
- Keep a high-resolution scan of the damaged original, and store the physical print flat, in an acid-free sleeve, away from heat, light and damp.
- Ask the restorer which areas were reconstructed rather than repaired, especially on faces.
- Label colourised versions as colourised, so later generations do not take guessed colours as fact.
- Share the before-and-after pair together. The damaged original is part of the photo's history too.
Handled this way, a restoration gives a family something precious without rewriting the past.
Sources: Restorations by Michelle Spalding. WBUR Endless Thread: family photo restoration (27 September 2019); My Modern Met: interview with Michelle Spalding (5 August 2019).
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