Cracked School Photos

When cracked emulsion reaches a school portrait, the result is a web of fine dark or light lines across the surface, with flakes lifting where the cracks meet. The cause is nearly always a print that dried out and stiffened before it was bent, or a plate whose coating crazed with age, and school photos kept in albums, frames and boxes were all exposed to it.

The restoration reads the cracked school portrait as a repair job: it removes the cracked emulsion and rebuilds what was underneath from the surrounding grain, keeping the backdrop color, the collar and the gap-toothed smile as photographed. Faces of one child in front of a painted studio backdrop, taken each autumn that were lost to the cracked emulsion are plausible reconstructions, so compare them with other pictures.

For cracked school photos the order is cracked emulsion first, faces second, upscale last, each step taking the previous result. Standard suits a school portrait for a screen; Pro or Max gives a cracked print more detail for reprinting.