It is not too late to consider giving a restored family photo as a holiday gift. Just today, I finished one which will be printed and framed as a gift for someone’s loved one – I hope to be able to show it here after the holiday! I can turn around most restorations in a day, and then it’s quite easy and fast to get it printed either locally or online.

Having a family photo repaired as a gift is a great, cost effective way to give something to a group of people. One of my customers recently had a photo of her parents restored and will be having a variety of sizes printed to give as a gift to at least ten different people. Think about it this way – if the restoration costs $60, and the prints are .15 cents each, you’re looking at a very economical way to give a gift.

The more important consideration is the value your gift will bring. During these tough economic times, families are pulling together and helping each out more than ever. And the importance of gifts that have meaning – versus something you put batteries in and numb out to – is becoming increasingly evident. If you happen to have a great old photo of a family member in an album somewhere, cracked and faded, now is a great time to have it restored and give it to your children and grand children. Or perhaps you know your parent has such a treasure hanging in their home – let them know it is possible to not only make it look as good as new but share with their descendants. Have more than one photo in mind? I offer a bulk discount to anyone who comes to me with more than one photo to be restored at one time.

Give me a call or send me an email – preferably with a high resolution scan of your photo attached, and I will get back to you quickly with an estimate.

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 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: