Most commissions that arrive with the words “I hope this is usable” begin with a photograph older than the person sending it: a 1974 print, a Polaroid, a black-and-white studio portrait in a cardboard folder. Old photographs are not worse references than phone snapshots — they are damaged in different ways. Fading, silvering, fold lines and a face the size of a thumbnail each have to be handled in the right order, and that order decides whether the finished canvas reads as the person or as a copy of a copy.
The three ways an old photograph fails
There is no single fix, because the three failures have different causes and different cures.
- Fading. Colour prints from the 1960s to the 1990s are dye-based and lose their cyan layer first, which is why old family snapshots drift toward yellow and magenta and why pale skin turns orange. The information is rarely gone, but it is squeezed into a narrower range than the original scene had.
- Physical damage. Fold lines, tears, a crease across a cheek, tape that has gone brown, a corner chewed by a dog. These sit on top of the image and have to be removed before a painter reads the photograph, because a brown crease reads as a stripe of shadow down the face.
- Size. A head in a 6 × 4 in print is often three-quarters of an inch across. At 600 dpi that is roughly 450 pixels — enough for proportion and bearing, thin for the fine structure around the eyes.
A painter can invent a background. A painter cannot invent a nose.
What can be recovered, and what cannot
Set expectations before money changes hands. This is the honest split, and it is the same conversation we have with every owner of an old print.
| Damage | Recoverable? | What it takes |
|---|---|---|
| Faded colour, orange skin | Usually, yes | A proper scan with colour correction, plus a second print if a relative has one |
| Fold, tear or crease over the face | Yes | Digital repair before painting — $60–$70 |
| Tape stains and foxing spots | Usually | Repair, or a darker background that lets the stain disappear |
| A missing corner or half a figure | Sometimes | Rebuilt from a second photograph, or avoided by cropping the composition |
| Face under 300 px on the long edge | Not at large sizes | A smaller canvas, so each pixel is asked to carry less paint |
| Motion blur or soft focus across the face | No | A different frame, or a deliberately softer, painterly treatment |
Scan the original — not a photograph of the print
The single most common mistake is a phone picture of the print lying on a kitchen table. The paper texture, the room’s colour cast and the shadow of your hand all enter that file, and the painter then has to separate them from the face.
- Flatbed scan at 600 dpi for any print 4 × 6 in or larger; 1200–2400 dpi for wallet-size prints or a small face you intend to enlarge a great deal.
- Save as TIFF or PNG where you can. Maximum-quality JPEG is acceptable, but every re-save quietly costs detail.
- No scanner? A phone scan app in daylight, held flat and parallel, filling the frame, gives about 3000 pixels on the long edge — enough for a portrait.
- Never run a heavy “AI enhance” or upscaling filter over it. Those tools invent eyelashes and teeth that were never in the photograph, and the painter then paints the invention. Gentle dust removal is fine; new features are not.
If you are unsure which of your files is worth sending, the tests in our guide to choosing reference photos apply to old prints exactly as they do to new ones.
When the photograph was never a portrait
The most common old reference is a group shot: a wedding line-up, a church choir, a family on a beach in 1981. Cropping one person out of it is routine studio work, but the arithmetic still has to be done. In a 6 × 4 in print a face in a group is often under an inch wide; at 600 dpi that supports a truthful 12 × 16 in canvas and a slightly softer 16 × 20 in.
We use one rule of thumb: below roughly 500 pixels across the face, a likeness at 16 × 20 in becomes a guess rather than a portrait. If your best frame is smaller than that, we either paint smaller or composite the face from a second photograph — and we tell you which before you pay.
Rebuilding a face from two or three photographs
When no single print shows the person as the family remembers them, two or three can be combined: bone structure from one, the expression or the smile from a second, posture from a third. This is a quoted step, not an improvisation. Restoration and compositing together add $60–$70 to the commission, and you approve the assembled reference before any paint is mixed.
One caution, learned from family arguments rather than from theory: keep the sources inside one period of a life. A face from 1968 with hair from 1985 reads as neither, and relatives notice within a second. If you want the person as they were around a particular birthday or wedding, send photographs from within a few years of that date.
Colour, when the print itself has faded
A faded print is evidence and a poor witness at the same time. When the colour has shifted we ask specific questions instead of guessing: what colour was the dress, what colour were the eyes, was the hair lighter then. Written answers from two relatives beat one confident memory. Where the evidence genuinely conflicts, we keep the disputed area quieter — a neutral background and muted fabric — rather than assert a colour the family will look at for the next twenty years.
Skin needs the same scepticism. A print that has lost its cyan shows sunburn-orange skin that was never on the person; we correct for the age of the paper first and then trust the relatives.
Size and price for restoration work
Restoration does not change the price of the painting. It is quoted separately, in writing, and it is usually smaller than people expect. Below is our published single-subject pricing; it includes worldwide shipping and the certificate of authenticity.
| Canvas size | 1 subject | Best for an old reference |
|---|---|---|
| 8 × 10 in | $189 | A wallet-size print, head and shoulders |
| 12 × 16 in | $289 | The safest enlargement from a 6 × 4 in print |
| 16 × 20 in | $389 | The default, when the print is sharp |
| 20 × 24 in | $549 | Group crops and half-figure compositions |
| 24 × 36 in | $789 | A scene, or a wall that needs weight |
For an old reference, 12 × 16 in and 16 × 20 in sit in the sweet spot. You rarely want to blow a 1974 print up to 30 × 40 in, because each brushstroke then covers detail the photograph never held, and the canvas starts to look like an enlargement of a photograph rather than a painting of a person. The measurements for choosing between those two sizes are in our wall-art sizing guide, and the full table by subject count is on the custom portraits page.
A family portrait assembled from different decades
This is the commission old photographs make possible and phone photographs cannot: five people who were never in the same room at the same age. It is done, and it is among the more moving things a studio gets to paint, but it is priced as the number of subjects it contains. Three subjects at 16 × 20 in is $619; four subjects at 20 × 24 in is $1,029.
Composition matters more than fidelity here. We place the figures so the light reads as one room, and we standardise the age of the references so the siblings look like siblings rather than like an office photograph taken across forty years.
The timeline, and the arithmetic of a surprise
Scanning, restoration and the digital mock-up add two to four days at the front. Painting is still three to five weeks and transit three to five business days, so five to seven weeks in total, the same as any other commission. For a birthday or an anniversary, count backwards and add a week for a local framer.
The exception is the gift with no deadline, which describes most commissions from old photographs. Nobody is waiting on the original print, so it is usually better to gather the relatives’ answers about colour and detail before ordering rather than after the canvas has arrived.
What never to do to the original
- Do not laminate it. Heat and plastic destroy both the print and the surface a scanner needs.
- Do not iron out a crease, and do not use a hair dryer on it.
- Do not glue it into an album, and do not cut it to remove a relative you would rather not see.
- Do not write on the back with a marker that bleeds through to the front.
- Do not send the only copy. Keep the original in an acid-free sleeve and send the scan.
How to start
Scan at 600 dpi or better, then send that file plus any second print you can find to [email protected]. You will get back a fixed price, a size recommendation for your wall, and an honest verdict on what the file will support — usually within 24 hours, and nothing is charged until you approve the mock-up. If you would rather see numbers first, the quote page takes five fields; if you would like to explain the photograph first, the commission form is the better door. Portraits painted from photographs are in the portrait gallery.