Before, and after.

Every comparison on this site is our own repair of a real photograph we have permission to show. There is no stock photography here and there never will be.

What you are looking at

The photograph on the left is the file the customer sent us. The one on the right is what came back, unedited afterwards.

We do not show a repair we could not reproduce for you. If a comparison on this page is better than the repair you get, the demonstration is a lie, and that is the one failure this business could not survive.

The hard one

This is the comparison the homepage opens on, and it is deliberately a difficult photograph. A flattering example would make us a worse version of eight free tools.

A black-and-white studio portrait of a man, cracked and stained, with the top corner of the print missing — Cracked all over, stained, and missing its top corner. The cracks and the stains are his photograph again. The corner is plain studio backdrop that nobody ever photographed.

The same portrait, clean and unbroken, the missing corner filled with plain studio background — Cracked all over, stained, and missing its top corner. The cracks and the stains are his photograph again. The corner is plain studio backdrop that nobody ever photographed.

The one that shows the limit

A third of this photograph was destroyed, and the repair filled it with a crowd of its own. We would rather show you that than a page of easy wins.

What fills a gap in a damaged photograph is our best guess, not what was there.

A photograph of a children's Christmas party under trees with the right-hand quarter burned away to black — The right-hand quarter of this photograph had burned away. It came back full of children. They are not the children who were standing there, and nobody can know who was.

The same photograph with the burned side filled in by children and women who were never in it — The right-hand quarter of this photograph had burned away. It came back full of children. They are not the children who were standing there, and nobody can know who was.

The ordinary job

Most photographs are not the hard case. Water staining out of the bottom of a box is the commonest thing we see, and it is the one that comes back best.

A black-and-white portrait of a young soldier holding a bugle, the emulsion flaked away down the right edge — Lifted emulsion and staining down one edge. The print is black and white and comes back black and white; the leaves along that edge are the repair's guess at what the damage took.

The same portrait cleaned, the flaked edge filled with foliage the repair supplied — Lifted emulsion and staining down one edge. The print is black and white and comes back black and white; the leaves along that edge are the repair's guess at what the damage took.

More, by kind of damage

Each damage type has its own page with three more comparisons of that damage, and an account of where the repair stops reporting and starts guessing.

See what we repair

See it on your own photograph

Somebody else's before and after is worth something, and yours is worth more. One repair is free and there is no card.

Repair one photograph, free