James E. O'Brien

One of my most popular graphic services is photograph restoration, which works great for me because it’s something that I really enjoy. I love taking photographs like the picture below, faded, torn, and too small to hang on the wall, and restoring them to something that not only looks nice, but makes a great 5 by 7 or 8 by 10 picture to display proudly in your home or office.

When pictures fade, it’s not always a nice even fade across the whole picture. Often, fading is uneven. this makes restoration a little challenging. I take the original image and and make a few high-resolution scans of it. In some cases, I use my scanner to perform some corrections. In the case with this picture, I went straight to Photoshop with it and created layers for the background, the man, and the boy. This allows me to to work individually with each element of the picture.

I worked in order from back to front. I repaired the missing pieces of the background using the elements around the missing pieces, and painted in the missing information.

Fortunately, there was a lot of usable detail in the man, so I was able to restore him pretty easily. I was even able to restore some of the missing detail in his shoes.

With this picture, the young boy was a bit over exposed, so if I tried to correct the exposure of the boy and man together, the boy would have been very bright and missing a lot of detail. To fix that, I created two layers, one for the boy’s face and hands, and another for his clothes. From there, I was able to fix the exposure issue and make a presentable restoration.

By working in layers, I have more control over restoration. The finished product (shown below) looks as though it was just removed from a protected time capsule.

I try to make the finished product large enough to be printed in 5 by 7 format or larger. The original photograph for this restoration was about 3 inches. By scanning in high-resolution, and saving the finished image at 150 pixels per inch, The 8 by 10 print of this picture worked out very well, and my client loved it.

Hire Me

If you have a photograph you would like restores, send me an e-mail. Basic restorations such as fading and exposure corrections cost $10.00 per image.  For torn or damaged photographs, prices will vary depending on the complexity of the repair.  The photograph restoration I used in this post costs around $25.00. If you’d like to contact me, please use the form on my Contact Page.

 Other Restoration Samples