This is an aunt and nieces portrait from one of my favorite eras – I love the clothes from this time and covet this gorgeous ladies shoes!

The original photo had a lot of surface cracks and an “oily” surface stain that needed to be removed. As usual, I wanted to remove the degradation without losing the detail of the photograph underneath. I’ve noticed this is a problem with restorations I see online – they often blur the area to remove the cracks or stain but then everything is altered. I prefer to take a very high resolution scan and go in with a graphics tablet and pen and literally erase the cracks by hand without using any filters, so that doesn’t happen anywhere but in background sections. This is a close up of the largest cracked area I needed to repair:

The final restored portrait was a success – my client “absolutely loved them” – and it will be displayed side by side with the other portrait of her grandmother, the Girl with Hat that I restored.

This beautiful photo of my customers grandmother melted my heart the moment I saw it.  And what a great hat she is wearing!

The original photo had beautiful graininess and composition but the surface had degraded over the decades, with areas that had faded or cracked. The customer sent me a very high resolution scan so that I could retain all of that beautiful texture and remove the aging without losing the fine details.

Here is the final photo, restored. Originally, this was probably a black and white photo and I initially desaturated it to black and white to work on it, but then returned a sepia tone to make it look antiqued. That was done simultaneously with the Aunt photo, which it would accompany.

I’ve shown you how I can tint photos using Photoshop to give them color – but finally, I got to see in person what a tinted photo done the old school way looks like up close.

This photo was originally black and white, and someone had carefully hand painted every bit of it with colored dyes, to make it look like a color photo. The problem? This 4 decade old photo had gotten some water on it and the ink had run!

The original was about 8×10. I scanned it at a very high resolution so I could see every detail, and went in with my graphics tablet and removed all of the cracks, large and small. I also removed a lot of speckling that had taken place in the dye surface. That was really the easy part and something I do regularly.

Replacing the area which had been wet was a bigger challenge because the ink had all run to the color blue. I needed to repaint it based on what little I could see underneath, and pick up the dresses fabric pattern from the areas which weren’t damaged. This was obviously the most time consuming aspect of the restoration.

In the end it was worth the detailed effort – here is the photo, restored and ready to be printed again.

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 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 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!

People often ask me if I’ve ever been thwarted in my attempts to restore a photo. Usually not, I say – but there are some photo eras which for whatever reason are harder to restore than others. The photographic technology of the 1970s, is a prime example. However photos were printed in that time period, they tend to go extremely bad, even when sealed up out of the sun. And once the image is damaged like this, it’s extremely hard to bring it back to full quality.

This photo was kept in an album made for photographs, supposedly “archival quality” and it was taken in 1978. It rarely saw daylight so I was shocked to find it in this condition when I opened up the album recently. In fact, ALL the photos from that time period, printed this way, were in similar condition.

I can honestly say I threw more of my Frankenphoto super powers into this one than I do most – and this was the best I could get in the end. I offer it as an example of both what IS possible and what is not, so that if you have photos in this condition, your expectations are realistic about what kind of restoration is possible. Perfect, certainly not – but certainly more recognizable (and now digitally preserved) than the original.

This customer from Singapore sent me two separate photos and asked if I could merge them together. I used a third photo, provided by them, as the background.

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I also did some retouching on their faces and eyes, and added shadows so they’d seem to be more realistically leaning into each other. This is the final result, the two kids together in one shot.

This treasured family photo was given to me to restore. It was discolored, cracked and torn in five places, and had some water marks and stains.

I pieced it together on the scanner and restored it as close as possible to its original condition. The hardest part was the mom’s left eye and cheek, which was really torn up so I had to redraw most of that. But this is the end result – quite near to perfect and ready to be shared with family members.