I run a combined art gallery, photography studio and printing shop in Clearwater, FL. One of the services we offer is restoring and retouching photographs and printing them as giclées (high quality reproductions) on paper or canvas. This is great if you have photos you want to showcase or if you have old photos you want to save before age gets to them. Here’s an example where a woman brought us photos of her mother and grandmother that she wanted put on canvas.
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. Before and after:
The hats were cut off in the original so I had to recreate them with Photoshop.
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 original photo of the women.
Ready for printing on canvas. Removed the background, cleaned off dust/scratches and fixed the colors.
The photo had scratches on it that I was able to fix. You can see the corrections below:
I removed the spots and scratches from the original and improved the color.
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.
I’ll be posting more before and after photos of other projects soon. Subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Facebook or Twitter to get updates.
