Torn School Photos

When tearing reaches a school portrait, the result is a ragged white line where the paper fibers show, sometimes with a missing corner or a whole strip gone. The cause is nearly always a print pulled out of a frame or an album, an argument over who keeps it, or a small child's hands, and school photos kept in albums, frames and boxes were all exposed to it.

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

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