Yellowed School Photos

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

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

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