Accidents and natural disasters are unavoidable. If you’ve been storing your photos long enough, it’s possible that they have or will suffer some water damage over the years.
While it’s disappointing to find your precious memories have become damaged by water, the only productive solution is to assess the damage and take action to restore the photographs to a condition that allows you to keep them for longer.
But how can you restore water damaged photos?
Well, the exact steps that you take will differ depending on your budget and the damage of the photos, but here are a few things you could do to bring your damaged photos back to life.
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Although repairing water damaged photographs is not an easy or pleasant process, there are some do-it-yourself methods that can help you improve the condition of the pictures, and at least ensure that they don’t get damaged any further.
The first step of the process is rather simple – you need to go through your photo collection and assess the damage that they have suffered. Identify the pictures that don’t have a negative – these should be your top priority because there will be no way to get them back if you’re not able to restore them.
If the photos have already dried, the restoration process will be completely different than if they are still exposed to moisture or even have traces of mold.
In the best-case scenario, you notice that your photos have been damaged immediately after it happens – that should give you the best chance to recover them.
If they’re still wet, you should get to work as soon as possible and gently remove any dirt or debris until the photos are completely clean. Rinse them with a wet cloth or cold water until all of the dirt has been removed. However, try to avoid touching or running water directly over the emulsion layer (light sensitive chemical layer where the image is), as that may cause further damage.
If you need to store wet photos, place them in cold water where the dirt won’t be able to dry and cause them to stick together, which is very hard to undo.
However, in the case that they’re already dried and stuck together, under no circumstances should you try and forcibly remove them from one another. Soak them in cold water and remove the dirt while trying to pull them apart gently and with little force.
Eventually, you should be able to remove most of the dirt, and the photographs should become less stuck due to becoming wet.
This can be a painstaking process, but it’s the only way to maximize the chances of recovering your photographs – dry photos that are stuck will almost always tear and rip each other as you try to separate them, which will be impossible to reverse.
Once you are done cleaning and separating the stuck pictures, you need to hang each of them on a clothesline and allow them to dry. Or you can lay them flat on a dry cloth or paper towel.
In some instances, the photographs will start curling during the drying process, so you need to keep an eye out, and if that does happen, apply a bit of moisture to the paper side of the photograph and then place it between acid-free paper, putting something heavy on top and leaving it for a few days.
If you follow the steps outlined above, you should be able to save at least some of your pictures, given that the damage wasn’t too severe and prolonged.
Still, there’s only so much that you can do for the physical copies of your photos – the damage that they have suffered will leave its mark, and the only way to restore the photo quality is to use software to fix the imperfections.
Why Should You Hire a Professional Photo Restoration Service?
No matter how much effort you put into saving your old photographs, there’s only so much you can do for physical photographs – they will eventually succumb to the effects of time, so the only permanent solution is to find a photo restoration service that can digitize your images and save them forever.
And the good news is, you don’t have to break the bank to hire a professional either – depending on your needs, you may be able to find an affordable solution that can restore your photo quality using advanced software tools and provide you with a permanent digital version.
By hiring someone to digitize the photos, you won’t have to worry about them suffering more damage in the future, and you’ll give yourself the best chance of preserving the photographs for future generations in a digital format.
In fact, if you end up hiring a professional company that will digitize your photos, you can ensure that they won’t suffer water damage ever again.
Photo Scanning is the Only Permanent Solution
There’s only so much that can be done for physical versions of the photos that have suffered water damage – in the best case scenario, you’ll simply be slowing down the inevitable deterioration process that will become more visible with each passing year.
Even if you manage to keep them away from water, decades from now, your physical copies of photos will inevitably succumb to the effects of time and start decaying.
That’s why the only way to ensure that your photos remain in top condition for future generations is to have them digitized.
If you hire a picture scanning service provider, they can transfer your entire collection into a digital format, allowing you to view all of the images on your computer and easily share it with friends and family members.
By storing your photos on a hard drive or the cloud, you can rest assured that no leaky pipe or flooding will ever cause them harm.
