How to Fix Foxing on Old Photos (Without Bleach)

The safest way to fix foxing on an old photo is to leave the original alone and fix a scan. Scan the print, remove the brown spots from the digital copy, and then lower the humidity where the original is kept so the spots don't spread. What you shouldn't do is the thing several popular pages suggest: treat the print with bleach or hydrogen peroxide at home.

Before any of that, check that it's foxing at all. A lot of spotting on old family photos is a different problem with a different cause.

On the scan, remove foxing spots digitally. Leave bleach and peroxide off the print.

Is it foxing, or something else?

The AIC's Book and Paper Group, the conservation profession's main reference, describes foxing as "scattered spots commonly reddish-brown in color." It's mainly a paper problem, and that's the useful clue for a photo collection.

Look at where the spots are. Foxing turns up on album pages, card mounts, the backs of prints and the paper borders around them. On 19th-century albumen prints, the same wiki notes the photo itself can fox, recording one case of "mounted albumen prints foxed on photo but little on mounts." But for 20th-century black-and-white photos it says foxing is "very rare."

On 20th-century black-and-white prints, the spots are more likely to be silver deterioration. The Image Permanence Institute describes redox blemishes as "local oxidation of metallic silver" that "appear as small pink, orange, or yellow spots." A related problem, silver mirroring, looks different: conservator Gawain Weaver's guide to gelatin silver prints describes "a highly reflective sheen with a bluish cast" that "only occurs in the shadow areas of the print."

Why it matters: the digital fix below works the same on all of these. But the storage advice and the decision about calling a conservator depend on what you're looking at, and a valuable albumen print with true foxing is a different conversation from a 1960s snapshot with a few orange specks.

What causes it, and why it comes back

Nobody has settled exactly what causes foxing. The AIC wiki covers both main theories, fungal growth and metal impurities, notes that "the very color of foxing connotes the presence of iron," and says it's "quite possible they often act in tandem." Either way, humidity drives it. The same source calls low relative humidity "the best precaution against foxing."

It also explains why spot treatments on the original disappoint: "If any iron/metal is left in the fibers, it will eventually re-oxidize and the stain will reappear."

Why not to bleach it

Some guides suggest dabbing prints with diluted hydrogen peroxide or bleach. The conservation sources say not to.

• The AIC wiki says that "bleaching would not remove metal impurities and may result in local metal-catalyzed degradation." In other words, it can fail to fix the cause and cause new damage.
• For photographs specifically, the Canadian Conservation Institute's care guide for black-and-white prints is blunt: "Do not attempt chemical treatments in aqueous solutions," and don't wash photographs in water "unless the stability of the gelatin layer has been confirmed."

A photo has an image layer on top of the paper. A treatment meant for a foxed book page can lift, stain or soften that layer, and that damage can't be undone.

Step 1: Scan it before anything else

Scan the print at high resolution and save an untouched master file. Our guide to scanning old photos covers DPI and file formats. If the spots are on the mount or album page rather than the image, you may be able to crop most of them out of the scan straight away.

Scan the back, too, if it has writing. Foxing on the back can sit right on someone's handwritten names and dates.

Step 2: Remove the spots from the scan

Work on a copy of the scan, never the master. You have two routes.

By hand in an editor. For a handful of spots, a healing tool is quick and precise:

• Photoshop's Spot Healing Brush is "a one-click solution for removing small imperfections," which works by "analyzing the surrounding content and automatically blending it." Size the brush just larger than each spot and click.
• Photoshop's Remove tool handles larger patches by "brushing over or drawing a loop around them," and Adobe's tip for complicated areas is to "use multiple strokes."
• In GIMP, the free Heal tool works like a clone stamp that blends: Ctrl-click on clean texture, then paint over the spot.

Go slowly around faces and eyes. A healed spot that lands on an eyelid or the corner of a mouth can change an expression.

With AI restoration. If a print is covered in dozens of spots, hand healing becomes an evening's work. An AI restoration pass treats the whole image at once. 43frames' photo restoration is instructed to remove "dust, spots, stains" along with scratches, creases and fading, while keeping the same people, faces, clothing and composition. It costs 8 credits per photo, and new accounts get 10 starter credits, so you can try one print first.

Be honest with yourself about the result. AI restoration redraws the image rather than editing pixels one by one. It usually handles foxing well, because spots sit on top of detail that's still there. Where a spot covered something completely, like an eye or a letter of handwriting, the tool has to guess, and a guess can look right without being right. Compare the restored faces against your untouched scan, and use a healing tool for any spot where the guess matters.

If the spots came with overall yellowing, our guide to removing yellow tint from old photos covers that part. For everything else, the full workflow is in how to restore old photos.

Step 3: Fix the storage so it stops spreading

Restoring the scan doesn't stop the original foxing. Humidity is what you can change.

• The Library of Congress care guide for photographs recommends a "relatively dry (30-50% relative humidity (RH)), cool (70°F or below), and stable" environment.
• The Canadian Conservation Institute goes further for black-and-white prints: relative humidity should never go above 60%, and it cites recent research putting the optimum at 30–35%.
• NEDCC warns that "the combination of high RH and high temperature encourages mold growth."

In practice, that means getting the box out of the basement or attic, into a closet on a main floor, away from exterior walls. Our guide to preserving old photos covers enclosures and storage in more detail. If the photos are damp or smell of mildew, start with restoring water-damaged photos instead.

When to call a conservator

For a family snapshot, scanning and fixing the scan is enough. Call a professional when the original itself matters: a 19th-century albumen print, a one-of-a-kind portrait, or anything you plan to display. The Library of Congress says that when better housing doesn't solve a problem, "conservation treatment by a photograph conservator may be necessary." The National Archives points to the AIC's Find a Conservator directory to find one near you.

FAQ

What causes foxing? Fungal growth and metal impurities in the paper, possibly both at once, made worse by high humidity.

Can I remove foxing with bleach or hydrogen peroxide? Not at home. Conservation sources say bleach can cause new damage without removing the cause, and not to put photographs through chemical treatments.

Will foxing come back? On the original, it can, if metal is left in the paper. A fixed scan stays fixed.

Is every brown spot foxing? No. On 20th-century black-and-white prints, small orange or reddish spots are often redox blemishes, a kind of silver deterioration.

How do I remove foxing from a scan? Use a healing or remove tool for a few spots, or AI restoration for many. Keep the untouched scan for comparison.