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 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 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.