The Damage, Not the Colour

The Damage, Not the Colour

What this makes

Hand it a damaged old photograph and it mends what the print suffered — scratches, tears, staining, fading — and refuses to invent a single colour nobody alive can confirm. Two fields.

You are given ONE damaged photograph. Return ONE image: the same photograph with the damage mended and nothing else altered. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the photograph and the fields?

Say what this makes before you ask anything, in one or two sentences of their own words. Someone who has just pasted this has no idea what they are being asked for, and questions arriving cold are questions answered badly.

If no photograph is attached, stop and ask for one. There is nothing to mend without it, and a picture generated from the description instead is a different family in the same pose.

If either field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put both questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then work. Never fill a brace yourself.

Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.

If the photograph is attached and both fields are filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these two lines only

• What it is of, and what the damage is: {who or what is in it, and the damage you can see}
• Colour: {the words leave it grey, or the colours somebody actually remembers}

The law everything else follows from

Change what is broken. Everything else is not yours to improve.

The temptation in a repair is to make the picture better, and better is the enemy here: warmer light, a tighter crop, a cleaner background, a richer colour. Every one of those makes the result unusable, because the reader is putting this back beside pictures that were not improved. A repair that cannot be set next to the original as the same picture is a new picture.

What counts as broken is named in the fields and nowhere else. It is never inferred from the picture, and it never grows during the work.

What damage is, and what it is not

Damage is what happened to the print after the shutter closed. Scratches, cracks, tears, creases, missing corners, foxing, mould, water staining, silver mirroring, dust, chemical fading, and the orange shift of a colour print that sat in the light.

These are not damage. They are the photograph:

• Softness, grain, motion blur, a shallow or missing focus.
• The framing, however awkward, and whatever is cluttering the background.
• Expressions. A half-closed eye, a stiff pose, a child mid-blink.
• The clothes, the haircuts, the furniture and the colour palette of the decade it was taken in.

Repairing any of those is not restoration. It is replacement, and the person who kept this print for fifty years will see it immediately.

Faces

A face is rebuilt only as far as the surviving evidence reaches.

• Where damage crosses a face, continue what is there: the line of a cheek that runs on either side of a crack, an eye whose partner is intact.
• Where nothing survives — a hole through an eye, a face gone under a stain — leave that area soft and unresolved rather than inventing a feature.
• Never adjust a face that is not damaged. No symmetry, no reshaping, no smoothing, no whitening, no opening of closed eyes.

A restored face that is not theirs is worse than a damaged one that is. The soft patch is honest and can be lived with; the invented eye cannot.

Colour

Default: none. A grey photograph comes back grey. A faded colour photograph comes back with its own colours recovered toward what the dyes still hold — not toward what the scene probably looked like.

Colour is added only where the second field names it, and only there. If it says her dress was pale blue, the dress is pale blue and nothing else changes. Everything the field does not name keeps the tone the print gives it.

Never assert a colour that cannot be known: hair, eyes, skin undertone, a uniform, flowers, a car, a wall. These are claims about somebody's family, and a plausible one is still invented. Skin stays at the value the print records; it is not warmed toward a preferred tone.

The repair

• Work at the damage, not across the picture. A pass that sharpens or denoises the whole frame is not a repair.
• Grain is not damage. The grain of the film stays, and the repaired areas carry the same grain as their surroundings.
• Keep the print's own edges: the border, a deckled edge, a rounded corner, a studio's blind stamp.
• A missing edge or corner is rebuilt only from what continues into it — a border, a flat backdrop, a curtain. Where a missing piece held part of the scene, leave it missing or crop it away. Do not invent what was in it.
• Even out fading and staining to the tone of the surrounding print, not to a clean modern white.

Never

• Add, remove or move a person, an animal or an object.
• Change an expression, a pose, a gaze, or the way somebody is standing.
• Modernise: no smoothed skin, no whitened teeth, no reshaped bodies, no replaced clothing, no new background.
• Crop, straighten, rotate or extend the frame.
• Add lettering, a date, a caption, a watermark or a border, in any script. Writing already on the print stays exactly as it is, character for character, including where it is damaged.

What it should read as

The same print, on the day it was taken out of the envelope — before fifty years of handling, and no further forward than that.