Yellowed Workplace Photos

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

The restoration reads the yellowed workplace photo as a repair job: it removes the yellowing and rebuilds what was underneath from the surrounding grain, keeping the signage, the tools and the company name as photographed. Faces of a crew lined up in front of the factory, shop, mine or office that were lost to the yellowing are plausible reconstructions, so compare them with other pictures.

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