The four written guides
Most of what decides whether a damaged photograph comes back is settled before any slider moves — at the scanner, and in an honest look at what kind of damage is actually on the paper. These four pieces are that part of the job written down. They are not a manual for the controls; the controls explain themselves on the page they live on, and each of them says what it is doing while it does it.
They are in reading order below. If you have a print in your hand and no scan yet, the first one is the only one that still has time to help you. If the scan is already made and something about it will not come right, start at the last one — it is short, and knowing early that a photograph is beyond recovery is worth more than an evening spent proving it.
What each one settles
- Scanning a damaged print so it can be repairedSix settings on the scanner, in the order you meet them, and the dust-removal hardware that makes a silver-gelatin print measurably worse.10 min
- Scratches, tears and creases are three different problemsDamage sorted by how much picture is left underneath it, because that one property decides whether a repair is arithmetic or guesswork.9 min
- Restored, now colourise itWhere recovering something the scan still holds stops, and adding something it never recorded begins. The two feel alike and are not the same trade.7 min
- What restoration cannot bring backSilvering, mould, a missing face, a print welded to glass. Four losses that sit in the paper rather than in the file, and what to do with the print instead.8 min
Two guides that were planned and are not written
Phase one of this site built the restorer and not the file-recovery half, so the two pieces about broken files — a JPEG that decodes halfway down and goes grey, and the chunk structure of a PNG that will not open at all — have nothing shipped to describe. They are named here rather than quietly dropped, because a guide index that lists only what exists tells you less than one that admits what it is short of.
Neither absence changes what the workbench does today. A file that will not decode is refused at the door with a reason, and the refusal is the same whether or not there is an essay behind it.
Then go and open a scan
Reading is not the work. Two of these addresses open the same workbench with different controls in front, which is the difference between a page about faded colour and a page about a scratch: both run the same engine and neither opens on the other’s knobs.