Before, and after.

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

What you are looking at

On the left is the file the customer sent. On the right is what came back, with nothing done to it afterwards.

No comparison appears here that we could not reproduce for you. If the work on this page were better than the work you receive, the demonstration would be a lie, and that is the one failure this business could not come back from.

The difficult one

This is the comparison the front page opens with, and the photograph is deliberately a hard one. A flattering example would make us a poorer version of eight free websites.

A monochrome studio portrait of a man, crazed and stained, the top corner of the print gone — Crazed all over, stained, and short of its top corner. The cracks and the stains are his photograph again. The corner is studio backdrop nobody ever stood in front of.

The same portrait, clean and whole, the absent corner filled with plain studio backdrop — Crazed all over, stained, and short of its top corner. The cracks and the stains are his photograph again. The corner is studio backdrop nobody ever stood in front of.

The one that shows the limit

A third of this print was destroyed, and the mend filled it with a crowd of its own invention. We would sooner show you that than a page of easy successes.

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

A photograph of a children's Christmas party outdoors with its right-hand quarter burned away to black — A quarter of this one had burned away. It came back full of children. They are not the children who stood there, and nobody alive can say who did.

The same photograph with the burned side made good by children and women who never stood there — A quarter of this one had burned away. It came back full of children. They are not the children who stood there, and nobody alive can say who did.

The ordinary job

Most photographs are not the hard case. Damp staining from the bottom of a tin is the commonest thing that reaches us, and it is the one that comes back best.

A monochrome portrait of a young bugler, the emulsion flaked away along the right-hand edge — Lifted emulsion and staining along one edge. The print is monochrome and returns monochrome; the greenery down that edge is what the repair guessed the damage had taken.

The same portrait cleaned, that edge filled with greenery the repair invented — Lifted emulsion and staining along one edge. The print is monochrome and returns monochrome; the greenery down that edge is what the repair guessed the damage had taken.

See it on your own photograph

Somebody else's comparison is worth something; yours is worth a good deal more. One mend costs nothing and no card is asked for.

Mend one photograph, free

More, by sort of damage

Each sort of damage has its own page with three further comparisons of that damage and an account of where the mend stops recovering and starts inventing.

See what we mend