Stained Church Photos

When staining reaches a church photo, the result is brown or grey blotches with hard edges, sometimes a ring, sometimes a smear across the sky. The cause is nearly always coffee, ink, adhesive, fingerprints and whatever else was on the kitchen table that day, and church photos kept in albums, frames and boxes were all exposed to it.

The restoration reads the stained church photo as a repair job: it removes the staining and rebuilds what was underneath from the surrounding grain, keeping the architecture, the vestments and the steps as photographed. Faces of a congregation on the steps, a robed choir or the church building itself that were lost to the staining are plausible reconstructions, so compare them with other pictures.

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