Stained Family Portraits

When staining reaches a family portrait, 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 family portraits kept in albums, frames and boxes were all exposed to it.

The restoration reads the stained family portrait as a repair job: it removes the staining and rebuilds what was underneath from the surrounding grain, keeping every face, the seating order and the clothing as photographed. Faces of three or four generations posed in a studio or on the front steps that were lost to the staining are plausible reconstructions, so compare them with other pictures.

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