Image Retouching Services
- Photo restoration
- Portrait retouching
- Background replacement
- Digital Reproduction
Competitive pricing, quality results, 100% money-back guarantee!
Need a treasured photo restored before it degrades further?
Conventional prints and films are susceptible to degradation by fluorescent lights, sunlight, humidity, and handling. Converting an image to digital will preserve that image and halt the degradation process. Furthermore, a digital image with professional retouching can bring life back to a severely degraded image.
Worried about damaging your heirloom during restoration?
We handle your image with individualized attention and care. Your heirloom will not be put through an automatic feeder; we carefully place it on a high resolution flatbed scanner and make a digital reproduction of the print without hurting it. If a print is framed behind glass and would be jeopardized by taking it out of the frame, then the print can be imaged within its frame.
Think the retouching will be obvious or look fake?
Amateur retouching utilizes changes over a broad section of the image which can make it look unrealistic or obvious. We use skilled manual retouching techniques that target changes in many small areas so the cumulative effect can hold up to enlargement without revealing the modifications. Like a magician, our goal is to improve the image without being able to detect it.
Worried about cost?
Clients, from around the world, have been surprised how cost effective our process is with quick turn around; we typically can do the work within a couple of days. We do not outsource our retouching, the work is done by digital experts in western North Carolina. We'll give you a fixed price based on inspecting the work.
Not sure you'll like the restoration?
We encourage feedback and if necessary, we will tweak the image until you are satisfied. We offer a no-questions money-back guarantee; if for any reason, you don't like the proofs, then we won't charge you for the work. You must be completely satisfied or we don't charge you. How can we afford to do that... because we get it right the first time!
Tell us about your needs: Free Retouch Estimate Learn more about our technique Learn more about digital reproduction of oil paintings
| Services In addition we offer the following services: - Email retouched proofs for your approval
- Photo printing services using a 100 yr archival printing process
- High resolution digital image file
- Volume discounts
- Repeat customer discounts
| | Vintage Image Restoration Types Below is a list of the different types of images that we can scan and restore a copy of: - Paper Prints
- Tin Types
- Daguerreotypes
- Film
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Retouching can include (but not limited to):
- Facial: Blemish, wrinkle, loose hair, red eye, eyeglass reflection removal, whiten teeth and eyes
- Backgrounds: Replacement, color change, simulated lens blurring, and introducing a vintage look.
- Color Balancing: Hue, saturation, true blacks and whites, colorize, create black and white from color
- Object Removal: Distractions like telephone poles, wires, people, dust, scratches, etc
- Reconstruction: Replace blinking eyes, remove bulges, adjust busts, waist reduction, and rollback aging
- Cropping: An image can transform from ok to fabulous with an appropriate cropping of the image
- Restoration: Old photo restoration (prints, tin-types, deguerrotype)
- Exposure: Rebuilding a full highlight and a full shadow without an overall cast or muddy look.
Samples
We have taken on some interesting and rewarding work, for instance:
Restoring the 1850s before your eyes
A customer liked his dagearrotype restoration so much that he challenged us with a tintype from the 1850s. See the restoration process for yourself. Here is an animation of the restoration process from the exposure adjustments through the retouching process:
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Strong Emotions
A client had a severely degraded image from his stint in Vietnam. He felt very strongly about that time in his life and wanted to see what could be recovered. This was a color print from the 1960s that had been subjected to 50 years of fluorescent lighting where the color was all be gone and so was the detail in the photo!
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Jungle Fever
A client wanted a CD album cover with a mixture of graphics and photographic images in the background. The challenge was to integrate the diverse elements into one cohesive image.
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Clear the stage
A recent client wanted stagehands removed from a rehearsal image:
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Vanishing Priest Act
A client wanted a priest removed from a formal wedding image (note: color balance was not allowed to change for this job):
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Dusting off a Daguerrotype from the 1800s
We were asked to create a digital reproduction of a family heirloom from the 1800x. We obtained a high resolution scan of the original and began retouching. When we balanced the exposure, it revealed an image riddled with dust, but we forged ahead anyway.
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After pain-stakingly removing each speck of dust, we then reconstructed damaged objects within the image (ex. face and fingers). We were pleased with the results and so was our client. Click on the images below to see a larger view.
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Making an Amateur look like a Pro
The mother of a bride came to me with 2 CDs of wedding images. The photographer made some severe errors while shooting an outdoor wedding and asked us to salvage the wedding pictures. We were able to retouch out flare, fill in harsh shadows, color balance, and recrop images to produce a wedding album for her.
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Vanishing Act
A sibling came to us with a family picture with her brother between two other family members. Her brother had died and she didn't have an individual photo of him, so she asked me to remove the 2 other family members. The individuals were overlapping each other, thus I had to reconstruct the person's entire left arm and shoulder after remove the other person. To enhance the challenge, her brother had an intricate sweater with a lot of detail. To her delight, I was able to reconstruct the image and deliver an 8x10 print of her brother. That was very rewarding!
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Resurrection
A client asked us to restore some 1800s vintage tin types and daguerreotype images that were severely degraded. Utilizing a high-end scanner with some careful tweaking of the settings, we were able to reproduce the images in a digital format. The restoration went so well, the client asked us to add back the look of an aged image!
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Teleportation
A client wanted a staff photo superimposed over a beautiful mountain scene. We took the staff photo in similar lighting to the proposed background image with portrait fill lighting to blend the two images together for a good portait and believable merging of images.