Stained Sports Team Photos

When staining reaches a team 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 sports team photos kept in albums, frames and boxes were all exposed to it.

The restoration reads the stained team photo as a repair job: it removes the staining and rebuilds what was underneath from the surrounding grain, keeping the jersey numbers, the trophy and the team banner as photographed. Faces of two rows of players with the coach at one end and a ball on the ground in front that were lost to the staining are plausible reconstructions, so compare them with other pictures.

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