retouching | Photographs Forever

With Christmas now on the horizon here are some ideas for a unique gift that’s ideal for those who can be tricky to find something a bit different.

Here just a few examples of the many ways I can transform your photographs….

If you have a photograph that has faded in its frame, it can be restored and re-coloured.

Two or more photographs can be combined and you can choose the people you want in the finished photo

Family groups can be ‘adjusted’ to include or exclude people!

Couples can finally be together in the same photograph.

Snapshots of pets can be made into portraits or montages

Treasured photographs that have suffered years of damage can be restored to their original state.

Combine a favourite photograph with a more interesting background.

Create a family montage from a selection of favourite photographs

Not sure which photos to use but can see the potential?
A Photographs Forever Gift Voucher of any value could be the answer.

I received this message from Irene after I has restored her photograph and I was quite touched –

“Thank you so much for your recent work which was excellent as usual. The photograph you restored fits beautifully into the frame and looks wonderful surrounded by a verse from one of my favourite songs. No apologies for the sentimental nature of the words! I’ve sent you a copy so you can see the end result.

There were some lovely surprises with the negatives. Some photographs I have never seen before and others have not been seen by the family for years. I have no idea who the people playing football are! I have included several of the photographs in my writing – which is nearly finished by the way.”

Always very gratifying to receive this kind of message.

Here is an interesting order I completed recently. Not only to combine two photographs that were in very poor condition but also to add the woman from the first photograph – minus baby! – to the second photograph while turning her around so she was facing the right way rather than turning her back on her husband!

This was the email I received from my customer…

“Well you’ve done it again, this time with knobs on and I am not referring to the door knob in one the photos! What an absolutely fantastic result. I appreciate the time and effort you must have put in to get the images of individuals in one photo transferred and included in another. The results to include the clean up and restoration are really brilliant, my great grandmother has literally “rejoined” her family – Fantastic. I can’t wait to present the final prints to members of my family.” John P

This is Jennifer and Frank’s Story as told by Jennifer

“I first contacted Richard at Photographs Forever to see if there was anything he could do with a photograph that had huge sentimental value to my partner Frank as it was the only one he had of his two daughters at that age. The photograph had accidentally been very badly damaged by falling from a car window in the rain and being repeatedly run over by several cars, here’s the photograph in question.

Richard said that unfortunately there was nothing he could do as the photograph was too badly damaged to restore.
I knew there was one other photograph of the two girls that was one of those tiny photographs in a key ring fob.

So I sent this to Richard to restore and also to ask if there was anything he could do to recreate the original photograph of the two girls with hi-vis waistcoats and hard hats. This is the resulting photograph that Richard created and sent to me

Richard sent this photo of the girls, to be signed for, and as I am at work, I missed the postie, got a card through the door to pick it up from the sorting office in West Bromwich. I did not know where it was so I asked Frank to take me. (I have not lived in West Bromwich very long). When I collected it he could see it was photos by the packaging, I told him that I had got you to do “something” to the picture of his girls but I would not tell him what because it was to be a surprise for his birthday, he seemed quite uninterested. He has since told me that he thought you had just made the photo bigger and made it oval, why he thought that I will never know! ANYWAY, when we got back home I opened it, I got goose pimples!
I said “You have got to see this, I cannot wait for your birthday”
He replied “No, put it away somewhere and I will have it for my birthday”.
I pulled it out the envelope again and said “No I cannot do it, you have to see this”.
When he saw it, well……………….. He is SO HAPPY, his bottom lip started to quiver and I have never seen him like that, he was astounded. I was afraid that he may not like it as it has been manipulated, it is not actually a memory, as photos normally are but no – he LOVES IT! We cannot believe the attention to detail, I thought that the girls were wearing hi-vis COATS on the original photo but they were not, they were actually waistcoat hi-vis’s, and the hard hats -on the original – the oldest girl has a blue hat and the youngest a white one, Richard is SO GOOD. AND the pen in the hi-vis on the youngest, AMAZING. WHAT MORE CAN I SAY……….. WE ARE SPEECHLESS, totally, I cannot thank Richard enough, he has made Frank’s day, his year, his birthday! I told Frank I would buy him a frame for it for his birthday, he said “No way, we are getting a frame on Saturday”.

Any ideas what I can get him for his birthday now please Richard??????????????????”

Last week I sent out an email to my customers and this was seen by Sam Satchell of the East Grinstead Courier and he thought the story of Lucy Dixon’s photographs was a very interesting one and consequently called me for more details. The full page article was published today!

I recently competed an interesting request to combine two photographs in order to include and exclude all the right people.

Here are the two photographs beside the finished photograph montage . My customer’s touching story is below

Photograph Restoration Montage

“Earlier this year my husband and I made the decision to put our house on the market. It wasn’t just any old house. It had belonged to my grandparents since 1957 and we bought it from my mum and her brothers after Grampy passed away in 2008. Over the last few years we renovated the house and garden, but with a growing family we felt it was time for a change.

When we told my parents the news they were so upset at the thought of saying goodbye to the house, that they decided to sell up themselves and buy (back!) number 10!

My husband remembered an old photo of mum and dad outside the house and we thought it could make a wonderful housewarming gift. We trawled through album and eventually we found it! Only it wasn’t quite how we’d pictured it. There were 2 photos of the whole family, neither was perfect and we really only wanted mum, dad and my grandparents in the frame. Enter Photographs Forever! Richard restored one of the photos to it’s original condition and colours, removed the other family members and pets, took Grampy from the other photo and popped him right in behind nanny as if he’d always been there. He even gave him a body! My parents loved their gift, they couldn’t believe that it wasn’t an original photo. It now takes pride of place on their mantle piece. Thank you Richard!” Lucy D.

I recently received a photograph from Bridie F asking if I could remove the extra person from the photograph of her Mum and Dad. This I did and created her Mum’s right arm at the same time! When this was done Bridie asked if I could gently colourise it in a way similar to those hand coloured at the time of the original photograph. Here is the original photograph, the manipulated version, the colourised version and finally the framed print in situ.

Photographs Forever – Photograph Restoration Example

Here’s Bridie’s story of the photograph:

“This photograph taken in rural Ireland on a sunny afternoon in 1935 shows a happy, smiling young couple, full of the joy of young love and the happiness of youth. In this photo Richard has created the picture of my parents that I have always wished existed, and that now holds pride of place in my sideboard family gallery.

The original, taken by my mother’s sister on an outing as a foursome, also has another young man standing beside my mother. Within weeks of the outing my aunt had sailed off to America to begin a new life, like so many Irish before her, and her young man went on to marry another local girl. The blossoming romance between my mother and father was forbidden on the grounds that she, as the daughter of a respectable but peasant farmer, was an unsuitable match for this young man from a well to do land owning family. Their relationship continued punctuated by meetings at the local dances and later by clandestine meetings in neighbouring towns for a few short hours at a time. It was to be eleven long years before they were eventually to marry in May 1946, and even then it was against his family’s wishes and without their blessing. Only my mother’s father, her friend and my father’s friend who had driven them over to the next town attended the ceremony. After a few days in Dublin by way of a honeymoon, my mother returned home and her new husband, unable to return to his family, travelled to England and began to build a new life for them both. He quickly saved enough to put a deposit on a small run down cottage, where they were reunited and spent the next fifty years together making a home and raising five daughters. Only the death of my mother was to separate them again in all those years, and even then only for a short time.

Virtually no photographic evidence of this period of their lives exists, and although I am happy to have the original photo to record the day it is impossible to express how wonderful it is to have this lovely gently coloured picture showing a time in their romance that I have only been able to imagine. This has only been made possible by Richards’s patience and skill for which I shall be forever grateful.”

I received an enquiry from a professional photographer in Mexico recently. He sent a scan of the image and, after I’d responded, he replied:

“A friend tried to restore this photo before, but it was AWFUL, they looked like plastic figurines! Please go ahead with the restoration. I will be very happy if you could do it fast, only if you can and it doesn’t affect the quality of the restoration. Please don’t make them like Toy Story!”

9 hours later he had the restored image for approval and replied:

“WOW, that was waaay faster than I expected. I am very happy with the result!”

I was intrigued to know how he found Photographs Forever:

“I Googled photo restoration… I found a LOT, some in the US, some in India and a lot in the UK. And your site is the one I liked the most because your examples look natural, not as CGI as most.”

So in recent months I have carried out restoration work for customers in Canada, Spain, Australia, South Africa, Isle of Man, Germany, USA, Italy and now Mexico!

I recently was asked by Simon, accordianist with the folk/dance band Bof! to manipulate graffiti he had photographed to produce CD cover artwork for their forthcoming CD.

Here’s Simon’s story:

“I play traditional French and Breton dance music in a band called Bof! We have been going since 2000 and in that time have made three CDs. Earlierthis year we decided to make a fourth recording and, having recorded the music, we looked around for a suitable CD cover image. We looked at dozens of photos – some of idyllic scenes of the French countryside and others of people dancing. But then we came across a photograph I had taken while on a holiday in France some years ago. It was a picture of graffiti on a wall in the ancient, picturesque city of Quimper in western Brittany. The image expressed strong traditional Breton themes using the medium of spray painting favoured by graffiti artists the world over. The music Bof! plays is traditional but with a modern flavour, so this image seemed perfect for us.

Somehow, however, we needed to superimpose text on the image. How could we do this without spoiling the artist’s work? We came up with the idea of manipulating the image to include the name of the band, Bof! and the title of the recording, Bal (the French for dance).

So I sent my image to Photographs Forever to see if they could do what seemed like an impossible job. I have to admit I wasn’t very optimistic, but you can see the results for yourself. Needless to say we are delighted with how it’s turned out and this image will be the cover of our new CD which we hope to release in June.

You can hear samples of Bof! music at: http://www.myspace.com/bofanost

Photographs Forever specialises in photograph restoration, photo editing, photograph retouching and photograph manipulation and has just improved the EXAMPLES tab of the website and has now been updated so that the different types of work undertaken are separated and examples are easier to see and evaluate. There new restored images, retouched photographs, edited photos, and other types of manipulation.

Before – Mud behind wheels, traffic cone, lamppost, man behind car roof

After – Clean car, no traffic cone, no lamp post, no man behind the car

Often people think of restoration as just rectifying old damaged photographs from many years ago.

What is sometimes overlooked is the number of improvements that can be made to any photograph of any age.

How often have you taken a photograph that was basically great but spoilt by something or somebody being in the photo that you don’t want in?

This is where photograph editing and photograph manipulation are extremely useful.

We can manipulate your photographs so they are what you want them to be so as well as improving fading, restoring colour we can increase the resolution so that the lower resolution photographs can be printed without pixellation.

Click HERE to take a look at some manipulation examples

Incidentally, the convertible Jaguar is available to hire for weddings and other celebrations. CLICK HERE for details

No Risk Photograph Restoration -
Free Advice Call 01825 740986

Archive for retouching – Page 3

9 Great Ways To Transform Your Photographs

Sentimental Framed Photograph After Restoration

Complex Photograph Montage

What To Do When Your Favourite Photograph Is Lost or Damaged

Photographs Forever Featured in Newspaper

Photograph Restoration Montage – A Special Gift

Special Photograph Created From The Only Photograph of 1935 Couple

Photograph Restoration, Editing, Retouching and Manipulation Examples Updated

Recent Posts

No Risk Photograph Restoration - Free Advice Call 01825 740986

Archive for retouching – Page 3

Recent Posts

No Risk Photograph Restoration -
Free Advice Call 01825 740986