Yellowed Funeral and Memorial Photos

When yellowing reaches a memorial photo, the result is whites turned cream or brown and a warm cast lying over the whole image. The cause is nearly always acidic paper and album pages, cigarette smoke and the slow chemistry of fixer left in the print, and funeral and memorial photos kept in albums, frames and boxes were all exposed to it.

The restoration reads the yellowed memorial photo as a repair job: it removes the yellowing and rebuilds what was underneath from the surrounding grain, keeping the face, the expression and the way they held themselves as photographed. Faces of the person being remembered, in the last good picture the family has of them that were lost to the yellowing are plausible reconstructions, so compare them with other pictures.

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