Scratched School Photos

When scratching reaches a school portrait, 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 school photos kept in albums, frames and boxes were all exposed to it.

The restoration reads the scratched school portrait as a repair job: it removes the scratching 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 scratching are plausible reconstructions, so compare them with other pictures.

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