It is not too late to consider giving a restored family photo as a holiday gift. Just today, I finished one which will be printed and framed as a gift for someone’s loved one – I hope to be able to show it here after the holiday! I can turn around most restorations in a day, and then it’s quite easy and fast to get it printed either locally or online.

Having a family photo repaired as a gift is a great, cost effective way to give something to a group of people. One of my customers recently had a photo of her parents restored and will be having a variety of sizes printed to give as a gift to at least ten different people. Think about it this way – if the restoration costs $60, and the prints are .15 cents each, you’re looking at a very economical way to give a gift.

The more important consideration is the value your gift will bring. During these tough economic times, families are pulling together and helping each out more than ever. And the importance of gifts that have meaning – versus something you put batteries in and numb out to – is becoming increasingly evident. If you happen to have a great old photo of a family member in an album somewhere, cracked and faded, now is a great time to have it restored and give it to your children and grand children. Or perhaps you know your parent has such a treasure hanging in their home – let them know it is possible to not only make it look as good as new but share with their descendants. Have more than one photo in mind? I offer a bulk discount to anyone who comes to me with more than one photo to be restored at one time.

Give me a call or send me an email – preferably with a high resolution scan of your photo attached, and I will get back to you quickly with an estimate.

This family photo of a Florida vacation in the 1960s, has become deeply faded from being framed in a sunny room for decades. I was given a digital scan of the original to see if I could restore the color.

It took dozens of adjustments to get there but in the end, I was able to return much of the color to the image – which is pretty amazing when you look at the faded one and how little actual color is there. Unfortunately, this is pretty typical of photos taken with the photography technology of that era – and since photos are meant to be displayed for all to see, this is a common occurrence.

Now that it has been restored, the families of all five grown up children can get a copy to print and hang – or store safely on a CD.

The end goal in all of the photo restoration I completed recently was to create a 20×30″ print that could be given as a gift to the children and grandchildren of the woman in the photos, who is now in her 70s. Rather than remove every photo from the background, I chose to make three of them retain thier “frame” and the others, larger and free floating in the foreground. I think this made for a more interesting and unique composition when all was said and done. Each individual photo is still in either a 4×6, 5×7 or 8×10 size, also, for individual printing.

This is a perfect example of how a photo restoration project can be both a way to recover and preserve family heritage, and a very cost effective way to give gifts to an extended group of people. Although this was a large amount of restoration overall, with the bulk discount I applied and the really low cost of actually printing individual fixed photos, the project resulted in a treasure for many people in this family. A similar photo collage approach is also ideal for photo memorials!

This very serious portrait was fading with age, and had become spotted with multiple stains.  To preserve it,  I removed all the brown stains, then adjusted the contrast and added back the sepia tone.

Adjusting the photo enhanced textures that were hidden in the faded image, like the lacy texture of her dress and paint strokes in the backdrop. I removed the black object on her chest, because it was too  nondescript to be sure what it was and it just looked like a blemish.

Something like this doesn’t take long at all but what a difference it makes in the final photograph, ready for framing.

Every so often, I see a photo that is so badly damaged that I wonder if I can actually fix it to my own satisfaction. The trick is being able to see beyond the cracks and tears to what was there before, and have the ability to repaint the areas that are gone. Although time consuming, this is far more possible than if the photo I’m working with is badly blurred or faded to the point that no detail is there.

When I first saw this photo, I knew I had a challenge ahead of me.  It was only 4×6 inches, and torn in so many places that it was held together on the back with scotch tape, folding in my hand. There were large chunks torn off the edges, staining and yellowing, and areas of what appeared to be a dark speckled dirtiness that I’d never seen in an image before. I scanned it as is, at the highest possible resolution I could. I was going to need to work on this in great detail and every pixel would count. But I could see that underneath it all, there was a rich, detailed photo of a beautiful woman and it was my job to save her.

Here, you can see a close up of one part of the original.

One of the first things I did was remove all of the unnecessary background so I could focus on her face and dress. Then, zooming in, I restored bit by bit, starting with larger areas and then zooming in even deeper for close up, tiny work. I had to recreate a number of areas, like around and through her right eye, and carefully restore her face to reality. The dirty areas were another challenge – having not encountered that kind of damage before, I had to experiment with techniques to make it go away, without ruining patterns and textures underlying it.

Here is the final image, which I was able to enlarge for a 8×10 photo print.

The trickiest part of this restoration was that the entire photo had a web of fine cracks and some serious deep cracks through both the faces and the fabric, which I needed to restore around without it appearing it had ever been damaged.

While some restorations can be done with a lot of filters and special effects in Photoshop, some need a lot of fine detail work with the graphic tablet and pen.

The results are worth it – in the end, you can’t even tell that the tears or cracks existed. And the detailed texture in the dress remains as true as the day the photo was taken.

My client on this project had a photo of her grandmother’s wedding, which had faded a great deal and become quite degraded over the years.

We discussed her expectations before I started – I wasn’t sure if there was enough information remaining in the original to get a sharp detailed result. Her priority was to enhance her grandmother’s face as much as possible. It’s important to understand that sometimes there just isn’t enough detail left in a photograph to restore, and that is why its important to digitize and restore old treasured family photos as early as possible. Another couple years and this young bride’s image might have faded from view forever.

This was the resulting photo of the entire wedding party.

Although it is certainly not as perfect as we’d have both liked to see, enough of the brides face was restored to give my client a reasonable likeness of her grandmother.

In the collection of photos my client wanted me to restore, there was one tiny 2×2 inch slide. It didn’t have a lot of detail and I asked what the story was with that one – he said it was possibly the oldest photo of his mother the family had. It was a negative and I really wasn’t sure if I could pull anything from it.  But I had to try!

The first thing I did was scan it at a very high resolution – increasing the size and capturing every available bit of detail.

Then I inverted the image so it was not a negative any longer and I could see the image I was going to restore.

Obviously, the resulting image was too faded so I adjusted it and started smoothing over the great deal of roughness in the image, that appeared when all the detail was enlarged. The final result is not perfect but it is a good deal better than the poor little slide, and I was able to provide something at 4×6 inches that was a pretty good likeness of the woman as a young lady.

My latest client collected a group of family photos on a visit to Africa, and sent them to me to restore.

As you can see, this wonderful photo of two little boys is badly damaged and aged.

It is about 40 years old so it has yellowed and up close, there are numerous cracks, both serious and fine.

The work took 4-5 hours total, because of the level of detailed work necessary to remove every crack, and repaint areas which were missing completely.  I also scanned it at a high enough resolution that the final image could be reprinted at 5×7 inches, and be a treasure to both men’s children.

This little girl’s mom wanted to create a very special birthday invitation for her daughters 1st birthday. She sent me a number of photos to look at, of her daughter wearing this pretty dress. Some had beautiful smiles but this was such an intriguing shot that her mom really liked, so I suggested we might use it to make her looking at something, like a butterfly.

The party theme was to be a birthday ball for a princess. I sent my client to iStockphoto to choose the perfect castle background scene, and got my instructions on what other elements I might include, and the wording to go on to the card. The final invitation will printed as the cover of a booklet, and I also provided this image without the words in 5×7 and 8×10 sizes so Aria’s mom could have it printed and framed.

And here is the final invitation. I removed her from the existing background, placed her into this castle scene and added the embellishments like flower crown, lilies, butterfly and sparkles. My client loved it even more than she expected she would, which always makes me happy!