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.