Photo Restoration

I also offer a photo restoration service, specialising in restoring and colourising old black & white photographs, or re-colouring faded colour photos.

 

This is a hobby of mine which grew out of my fascination with family history. I began digitally cleaning up old family photos and found it a welcome challenge adding colour to bring the relatives and ancestors 'to life'. I soon discovered that I had a flair for this (must be the artist's eye?) and realised that this would make a neat little service I could offer to others.

 

See these examples of my own family photos I restored (NB remember that these are low-quality versions due to the limitations of the web!) The first is a restore only. The original photo was stuck onto an oval tin plate and was scratched, damaged and faded. I scanned the photo and restored it by removing the scratches and other damage, adjusting the contrast and giving it a normal 'photograph' shape:

 

 

 

 

In the above example the picture on the left is the original old, faded and scratched photo. The picture in the centre shows the photo after digital cleaning, cropping, removal of scratches, adjustment of contrast etc. The picture on the right is the end result after the addition of colour. This is all done digitally by hand. There are products available which will 'automatically' add colour to black and white pictures but I believe they look unnatural. My aim is to add colour and adjust hue and saturation in a way that makes it look like the picture was taken yesterday. Obviously, results vary depending on the state of the original photograph. This example gave a nice result:

 

 

Sometimes I come across photographs which seem beyond repair but I am always up for the challenge. Here is an example of a battered old photo from 1920 which needed a little artistic license but gave a result which is miles ahead of the original!:

 

 

 

In a similar vein, this example offered an original which was very faded, covered in scratches and marks, including the sinister looking red substance (which, I am assured, wasn't blood!). After a little work I was happy with the resulting colour version:

 

Photographs can also be part-coloured to emphasise the main subjects, as in this example:

 

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If you would like to take advantage of this service I offer the following options:

 

1. Quick restore only - clean-up of photo which may be faded and have the odd scratch/ mark - £10 for initial photo plus £5 per additional photo in same order

 

2. Full restore only - removal of scratches and creases, adjust contrast etc - £15 for initial photo plus £10 per additional photo in same order