Silvered Photos: Can They Be Saved?

I’ll skip right to the punchline, for those of you who know what silvered photos are: yes they can!

What are silvered photos?

Silvered photos are damaged photos that have a metallic mirrored effect on the surface. This usually happens when these older, silver-based photos were not stored properly and subjected to extreme temperatures, sunlight, they were stored on non-archival safe albums, they have have been layered on top of each other in a box, or subjected to oil from your fingers. Generally once silvering begins there is no way to stop it, although you can slow down the damage by moving the photo into proper storage.

There are restorers out there that may be able to assist in restoring the actual physical photo, but there is another way to save the image and that is by digitizing it properly.

Can silvered photos be restored?

Yes! Once silvering starts it is irreversible, so while you can slow the damage by moving your photos to a climate controlled area, you can not stop them from deteriorating. Your best option is to get a good digital file as soon as possible

Restoring and saving silvered photos begins with a good scan. You need a high resolution file in order to have enough to work with to remove the silvering. There are several different ways to scan a photo - the most popular methods are with a phone app, a flatbed scanner, or a camera. A phone scan will not be good enough quality due to lower resolution and glare, and there is evidence that flatbed scanning a silvered photo will cause further damage as well as giving you a digital copy where the silvering is more dramatic. Hiring a professional to camera scan your photos will give you the best quality digital copy of your photo, and likely that professional can also restore your silvered photo before giving it back to you.

But really, how well can silvered photos actually be restored?

Very well! Which one would you rather keep in your collection? We can remove some of the silvering with certain techniques employed during the scanning process. Then after we have the digital file we work some Adobe Photoshop magic to remove the rest.

Do you have any silvered photos in your collection?