Frequently Asked Questions

I have a picture that is torn, can you fix it?

Torn photographs are no problem. We scan the pieces and rearrange them on the computer like a jigsaw puzzle. If the jagged edges do not exactly match up, we manipulate the image to blend the edges. Once we generate a digital master file like this, we can print as many new copies as you like.

I had old family photographs in a basement that was flooded. How can I save the photos?

Water does not immediately ruin a photograph. Remember, up until a few years ago, every piece of photographic print had to be processed in a chemical solution. What ruins pictures is sticking together when they dry, mold and mildew growing if they are not dried quickly and any impurities in the water, which may stain the picture or attract mold and bacteria. If your photo album is soaked, you need to move fast. Get the prints out of the album. If the water was not clean, wash the photos gently in a tub of clean water and then lay them out to dry. Depending on the type of the paper, the prints may curl as they dry. It is hard to prevent this without specialized equipment. Remember you do not want anything touching the image side of the prints as they dry. In most cases the curling is not severe and can be corrected after the print is completely dry by placing it between the pages of a book and putting a stack of books or other weight over it.

If it has already been a while, it may still not be too late. If you have a bunch of photos stuck together, try to separate them. Be very careful and stop immediately if the printed layer starts to come off the rest of the paper. In that case, soaking the prints in water may help loosen them.

If your photographs are dirty, you can wash them with cold water. A little dishwashing detergent will not harm the pictures, but make sure that you rinse it thoroughly afterwards.

While getting wet with rain water, being washed and dried does not significantly harm a photograph, it may remote protective coats or introduce sufficient contaminants to make the photograph start to age faster. We believe that any photograph you care about should be scanned and a digital copy saved in an archival medium.

I have a photo with large areas chipped off. Can you really make it look new again? How do you do that when you haven't even seen how the picture is supposed to look in those areas?

While we cannot make something out of nothing, we are lucky in that most photographs can be fixed without magic. If the chipped area is part of a pattern, like a dress someone is wearing, we can copy it to match from elsewhere in the picture. If the problem is small or thin like a scratch, we can fill it with the same color and texture as the area surrounding it. If it is covering an important detail of the picture like an eye, we can copy the mirror image of the other eye to fill it in. If it is an unimportant piece of the background, we can blur it out or cover it with some other element in the picture. And finally if you have somebody with a completely missing face in the picture, we will put in the likeness of our office assistant. We hope you don't mind.

What about ethical concerns with photo manipulation?

If you took a picture of your son at his junior league baseball game and the moment is frozen for all to see with the ball clearly a few inches higher than where his bat is going, we have no problems lowering that ball a bit for a kinder, gentler state of altered reality. If it was a professional game and you intend to submit the photo for publication, it would be a major ethical violation. It is not so much manipulating the image that is the problem, but what you do with it. We record that the image has been digitally manipulated in the metadata that is part of the image file. After much publicized recent problems, journalists are getting increasingly sophisticated in checking for evidence of manipulation. By having us alter images, you are agreeing to not use the image in any way which might be hurtful to others. If we feel that a certain request seems unusual, we may ask for model consent or any other documents we deem necessary. We could in principle refuse do comply with certain requests, though we have never had to do so.

I have a handful of family pictures that need restoration. Would it make sense to send them to you, or am I better off purchasing digital darkroom software with the money and doing it myself?

The answer depends on how much free time you have and whether you are already quite familiar with digital imaging and graphics. If you are already a photographer, learning Photoshop may be a very useful investment for other reasons. If restoring those pictures is the only digital darkroom application you have in mind, it is probably more economical to have it done professionally. Full-featured image processing software costs more than a few hundred dollars. The automatic settings for contrast and color balance in these programs will significantly improve some photographs, but for proper results expect to spend a lot of time learning how to operate the various tools. Also just about anything can be done in more ways than one, and figuring out the efficient way to do something takes either a lot of trial and error, or consulting a book. If you have much more time than money, we recommend that you look into the open source Linux software called GIMP.

Can you also restore other artwork, such as oil paintings

Please note that we do not work on the original print. We create a new digital master for the image and fix the problems on it. We can print you a new copy of the artwork, but you should look for another service to fix the actual original artwork.

I have an 8x10 image to be restored, but I will only need that printed as 4x6. Your How to Submit section says to use 300dpi. Should I use 300dpi at the size of the original or the print that I need?

If you have a large original, but you are only interested in printing the restored image at a smaller size, you may send us a scan at reduced resolution. For example if you have an 8x10 picture, at 300dpi it would be a digital file of 2400x3000 pixels. If you will be printing the restored photo no larger then 4x6, you only need a file that is 1200x1800 pixels, so you can scan at 180 to 200 dpi. While this would save you some money, because working on a smaller file size is cheaper, we would urge you to make sure that you will never need a larger print of that image. If you changed your mind and asked for a larger print, we would have to start with a larger scan all over again. Most restoration work we perform on a small file size is not easily transferable to a larger file. In other words, we may have to charge you another restoration fee if you wanted a larger file size at a later time.