A portrait from an old or poor photograph

Not every portrait starts from a good photograph. Sometimes there is one picture from a family album; sometimes an accidental frame taken a second before the person turned away. And sometimes that is exactly the picture that has to become a portrait, because there is no other.

The good news: an imperfect photograph is not a dead end. The bad news: not everything can be repaired, and it helps to know in advance what can't.

What can be fixed

A lot of what looks like fatal damage doesn't affect a portrait at all:

• Scratches, creases and stains on an old print. The drawing is made from scratch; the paper's damage doesn't travel into it.
• Faded colour, or a photo gone yellow. The tonality of the work is chosen anew.
• An unfortunate background, strangers, clutter. The background of a portrait is built separately in any case.
• Clothing you dislike. It can be replaced, as long as it's clear what it should be replaced with.
• Mild noise and grain. As long as the features read, grain is just noise.

What can't be fixed

All of these are about information the photograph doesn't contain. Inventing it means inventing a person:

• Blurred eyes. The one thing a portrait lives on. If the sharpness isn't there, the likeness will be approximate, and everyone who knew the person will see it.
• A face lost in shadow. Where the photo is a black patch there is no form and no features. Only what was recorded can be lifted.
• Blown-out highlights. White patches on the forehead and cheekbones are the same emptiness from the other end.
• Heavy compression. A screenshot from social media, an image forwarded through a messenger, a photo of a screen: the detail has already been replaced by artefacts, and there is nowhere to recover it from.
• The wrong angle. Turning a head from profile to full face means drawing a different face. A portrait is built in the angle that exists.

How to help the work

Send everything you have, not one picture. Frames that are useless on their own together give what no single one does: the real colour of the eyes, the shape of the ears, how the hair sits, the asymmetry of a smile. One frame answers "what did they look like here"; ten answer "what did they look like".

Scan rather than photograph. From an old print, a scan gives noticeably more than a phone shot: no reflections, no perspective distortion, no shadows from your hands. No scanner at home? Then shoot in even, diffused light, straight from above, without flash.

Send originals. A photo forwarded through a messenger is compressed several times over. In Telegram send it as "File", in WhatsApp as "Document", or share a cloud link.

Tell us about the person. What the photo doesn't show but you remember: the colour of the eyes, the grey in the hair, the frame of the glasses, a favourite jumper. None of that can be drawn out of thin air, but with your words it stops being guesswork.

About expectations

A portrait from a weak source does work, it simply contains more decisions by the artist and less photograph. That is a normal way to work, and for the only surviving picture of someone it is often the only way.

What matters is agreeing beforehand on what you expect. If you need an exact likeness down to a mole, you need a source where that mole is visible. If you need a recognisable image of a person you remember as living, what you have will do, and the rest we settle in words.