Yellowed Immigration Photos

When yellowing reaches a immigration 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 immigration photos kept in albums, frames and boxes were all exposed to it.

The restoration reads the yellowed immigration photo as a repair job: it removes the yellowing and rebuilds what was underneath from the surrounding grain, keeping the luggage tags, the clothing and any writing on the back as photographed. Faces of a family at the dock, at a ship rail or in the doorway of a first home in a new country that were lost to the yellowing are plausible reconstructions, so compare them with other pictures.

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