How we restore
A restoration is a promise about the truth of a photograph. These are the rules we keep to honor it, and the things we refuse to do.
We repair. We don’t invent.
Damage, like a crease or a water stain, is filled from the evidence around it in your photograph: the grain, the tones and the patterns that survive around the wound. That is repair.
Where a face or a detail is gone, torn away or dissolved, we do not fabricate one. A made-up face is not your grandmother. It is a stranger wearing her photograph, and we won’t sell you that.
The honesty grade
Before you see a preview, and before there is anything to fall in love with, you get a damage read and one of three grades for the restoration ahead:
- Routine
- Fading, age toning, light wear. Expect a clean, faithful restoration.
- Challenging
- Damage crossing important detail, like a crease through a face or heavy staining. Expect a strong restoration, and expect the hard parts to be named before you see the preview.
- Partial
- Some content is unrecoverable, like a missing corner or an area torn to the backing. We’ll tell you plainly what is gone, repair everything the surviving image supports, and clean the damaged edges rather than invent what was there. The restoration will be honest rather than complete.
The Partial grade exists so you never pay for a restoration that guessed.
Faces are sacred
Identity comes before beauty, and that order is written into the restoration system itself as a rule. No smoothing someone into a stranger, no de-aging, no “improving.” The person in the restoration stays exactly who they are in the original, with only the damage lifted away.
You keep the truth
Every order ships your original scan back alongside the restoration, untouched. The family keeps both the truth and the repair, and can always show one next to the other.
About color
Color is an option, never the default. The colors are a historically informed interpretation, period-plausible and tonally conservative, and they are not recovered fact. You see the restored black-and-white and the color version side by side, each one labeled, and you choose.
And then we forget it
Your photographs are kept through delivery and a 30-day window for reprints and support, then deleted automatically. Uploads you don’t order are deleted within 48 hours. They are never training data, and never shared. Read the Retention Policy