Bringing the Past to Life

What do you do with a hat that’s not there? That’s the problem we faced when we got the job of restoring this photo of a woman’s mom and grandmother. Read how we corrected a “little” mistake made decades ago and turned an old photo into a family heirloom.

Looking at the “before” picture, you can see one big problem—the tops of their heads are chopped off! With the goal being to print this photo on canvas, Scott Menaul (our founder and the resident Photoshop guru) set about making it worthy of hanging on the wall. Here’s what Scott wrote in his blog about this project:

In the original photo, you can see that the tops of their hats are cut off. Using Photoshop, I expanded the picture by extending the wall in the background and recreating their hats (that’s a pretty neat trick.) I also adjusted the colors to make up for fading.

Here’s another great group shot of the women with their friends. She asked that I remove the background (chain link fence, people walking by) so the image in the giclée on canvas would focus on them. Here is the before and after:

The photo had scratches on it that I was able to fix. You can see the corrections below:

If you have a box of old photos or even newspaper clippings or your kids’ childhood drawings, you should dust them off and have me restore and reproduce your favorites. You’re welcome to bring your stuff to my Clearwater, FL studio and we can go through it and figure out what you want to do. Call me at 727-726-7411 or message me online.

Just today I had a woman and her mother come pick up a reproduction of a family photo collage. The collage was made over 30 years ago, pieced together from more than 100 family photos from over the past century. The daughter was in town for a couple days and she wanted to get copies made since they weren’t sure how much longer the photos and the glue holding them together would last.

They had tried going to Kinkos to make copies but they were told the collage would have to be taken out of its glass frame and run through a rolling scanner, which would have wrecked the fragile photos. They came to me to see if I could reproduce it without taking it out from behind the glass that was helping hold it together.

As a photographer with my own studio and equipment, I had no problem shooting it through the glass and making digital copies. As a Photoshop expert, I was able to clean up the photos and get it ready for printing. And as a giclée printer I was able to handle the reproduction in-house and have the entire job done within 3 days. I also gave her it on CD.

If you have a photo you want restored and retouched, feel free to call us at 727-726-7411 and we’ll be happy to discuss the possibilities with you.