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.

Photos, particularly those from the mid to late 20th century, have not really stood the test of time. We all have boxes and albums of family photos from that era that are yellowed and faded from sunlight.

In this photo, taken in the early 1970s, not much is wrong except that it is badly discolored from age. So I’ve scanned it and adjusted the colors, making a digital copy that can be reprinted.

And for the eagle eyed amongst you – yes, that is me on the right. Mom rocked the homemade Halloween costumes!

This young mom had a perfect photo for her families holiday greeting card – if only the background of the image were better! So she hired me to remove the background and replace it with something seasonal, and do some photo retouching to make it perfect. All I really had to do was remove some facial glare, brighten everyone up and adjust some clothing colors to work perfectly with the background.

This is the original – a great shot!

And this is the final result, as it will look in the photo frame she was going to use: