As you may or may not know, PerfectaPhoto is a side business I developed when I owned my own web and graphic design business for many years. I worked from home and have a cherished “home office cat,” Oscar, who has been my daily companion. Due to the recession, I was forced to close Business Design Studio to new customers and get a full time job – but I’ve kept PerfectaPhoto alive because I LOVE the work of restoring treasured family photos and creating new works of art from your favorite digital images for personal enjoyment and unique gift giving. Most of the projects I showcase on this site were done in a weekend or an evening or two, and I intend to keep this business for a long time.

But every morning, dark or light, cold or warm, I’m now up at 5:30 am… rousting Oscar as I go off for my 1/2 hour drive to Schenectady, where I work as a graphic designer. After over a decade in a brightly sunlit, plant rich environment with rainbow making prisms in the sunny windows where I can make my own hours and life, I spend my days in a small, gray, dark cubicle.  Some days, the sun is down when I get back home. It has not been easy – regular paycheck aside – but by far the hardest part has been leaving my little pussycat behind me every day.

So, to make the transition easier, I dug through a series of photos I’d taken back when Oscar was featured as a “home office cat” in well known home business magazine article, and created an 11×17 photo poster that I could hang behind my computer monitor in the cubicle. It will never take the place of having the big puffalump snoozing in my lap while I work all day, but it will remind me why I work hard all day to bring home the catnip.

The Catalina Islander, a local newspaper in California, hired me to restore and color tint this vintage photo to use for a July 4th edition. A reader had provided the photo, which featured his mother, on the left, as a young woman.

After I got past the initial puzzle of how the drummer was staying upright without a tow rope, in a day and age where Photoshop was non existent, I started by cleaning up some minor degradation and spotting. Then I adjusted the contrast in places that were dark but still needed color, like the flag’s stripes. The client provided some input into the colors to use, and I chose others that seemed appropriate. After a number of revisions, the new version looked like it had been tinted the way it was done by hand in the old days of photography – using Photoshop. This is the final result:

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!

This was a fun – a wife contacted me and asked me if I could take a photo of her husband, taken at a wedding in his kilt, and remove him from the background and put him into a photo of a Scottish scene with a castle.

The castle photo was purchased as stock photography, and then I worked on removing him from the original photo. Some minor correction, and into the new scene he went.

Once he was in the castle scene, I had to re-size him so he’d seem proportionally correct to the castle door. I cropped the entire image so that the castle tower would seem to be a much bigger building off camera. Some more correction was needed so the lighting would be right. Then I added a shadow to make it realistic.

After that, I applied painting styles to the entire image so that the end result would look like it was made up of brush strokes. I delivered it to the wife as a gift she could frame and give.