Creased Baby Photos

When creasing reaches a baby photo, the result is a white line where the emulsion broke along the fold, very often straight through a face. The cause is nearly always a print folded into a wallet, a letter or a pocket, then flattened again decades later, and baby photos kept in albums, frames and boxes were all exposed to it.

The restoration reads the creased baby photo as a repair job: it removes the creasing and rebuilds what was underneath from the surrounding grain, keeping the christening gown, the fine hair and the blanket pattern as photographed. Faces of a newborn or toddler, sometimes with a parent's hands holding them up that were lost to the creasing are plausible reconstructions, so compare them with other pictures.

For creased baby photos the order is creasing first, faces second, upscale last, each step taking the previous result. Standard suits a baby photo for a screen; Pro or Max gives a creased print more detail for reprinting.