Scratched Funeral and Memorial Photos

When scratching reaches a memorial photo, the result is fine white or dark lines across the emulsion, often clustered in one direction. The cause is nearly always loose storage in a shoebox, a drawer shared with keys and coins, or a print dragged across scanner glass, and funeral and memorial photos kept in albums, frames and boxes were all exposed to it.

The restoration reads the scratched memorial photo as a repair job: it removes the scratching and rebuilds what was underneath from the surrounding grain, keeping the face, the expression and the way they held themselves as photographed. Faces of the person being remembered, in the last good picture the family has of them that were lost to the scratching are plausible reconstructions, so compare them with other pictures.

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