Photo Restoration: From Fair to Great
Originally published at Welcome To The Dollhouse. You can comment here or there.
his is going to be a quicky from me tonight, my friends. The weekend was unpleasantly spiced with coupleship drama…again. Not.going.into.it. Even Zizi decided to take out my very last nerve and stomp on it. I’ll be picking up my discipline (not the fun sexy kind of discipline…minds out of the gutter, please) books tonight for a little bedtime reading instead of my usual games of Marple on the iPhone before the Ambien CR kicks in. What? Me stressed? You must be kidding!
Anywhooo, tonight I want to sing the praises of my new friend Kevin, the photo restorer.
You remember my recent post about Finding Treasure? My treasure needed to be fixed up…renewed, as it were. But as I had no idea of who the best online photo restorers were, I turned to my friend Google and asked. He rewarded me with a long list. And I’ll admit it, my attention span is short. I picked 3 from the first 2 pages that Google offered me. And off I sent my treasure for restoration estimates.
Kevin was the first to reply. He charmed me by telling me how cute the little girls were in the shot. Yes, I was cute once upon a time, wasn’t I? His price was reasonable and he assured that he could indeed make the picture beautiful. His turn around time was about a week.
The next person got back to me later in the evening. He had a flashier website and promised a turn around of a couple of days. The price point was a touch higher than Kevin’s but not appreciably so.
Number 3 of the bunch had some difficulties with my attempted upload of the TIFF file that was requested. As such, the quote didn’t get sorted out until the next day. A plus of #3 was the explanation of the work that needed to be done. In addition to the obvious fold in the photo, there were smaller cracks in the emulsion that needed to be repaired as well. The turn around time offered was 1 1/2 weeks with a price point about $20 higher than the other two (though to be fair, I think he was sending an actual photo back when I only needed the electronic file).
So in considering all this, I fell for the speed and the flash and opted for number 2.
After paying #2, I waited for my photo proof to be ready. True to his speediness, by the next afternoon, I received an e-mail telling me that my proof was on the website to be approved. The great thing that I could see instantly was how well the major defect had been fixed. But the online preview allowed no evaluation of the smaller cracks in the emulsion. The preview was just too small.
I wrote back to #2 explaining my concerns and he sent me a larger proof. OK, I thought as I looked at it, there are no cracks either large or small, but was it my eyes? The photo looked more grainy/less sharp.
Original:
Restored Photo:
Again I wrote back, apologizing for being a pain (why I always apologize when I am the client, I do not know, but it is my tendency) but asking about whether there was a way to reduce the graininess. Answer: no. He used a filter to get rid of the small cracks, sparing the faces…these he repaired manually, but this filter caused the graininess. Nothing else could be done. End of story. End of work.
Oh well. I thought. Guess that’s that. I approved the proof, wondering whether all of the restorers would have ended up with the same result or whether Mr. Quick’s approach led to graininess. I stewed over this for a day and then decided to see what another restorer would do with the photo. And this took me back to Kevin of Best Photo Repair.
I visited Paypal and submitted the fees for this second attempt at restoration. Kevin e-mailed me Friday night saying that he would have a proof to me as soon as he could. By Sunday night, there in my inbox was a beautiful restoration done in both black and white and sepia. The major and minor defects were repaired and the sharpness was better than the original. Now this is what photo restoration is supposed to be!
After I approved the proofs, Kevin had the photo files (he graciously allowed me to have both the black and white and the sepia versions at no additional charge) to me within minutes. I uploaded them to good ol’ Shutterfly and sent links to Cookie (my cousin in the picture) and Auntie M. Somehow in explaining about the two restorations, I managed to confuse Cookie into thinking that one of the two files (b/w and sepia) was the not-so-good restoration, but she couldn’t tell which one it was. Sigh… This necessitated an explanation that I wouldn’t have uploaded the not-so-good restoration to Shutterfly when we had a great restoration from Kevin in B/W and sepia…but understand that this is my cousin who asked me one day, “What’s a double espresso?” and was truly amazed to hear that it was two shots of espresso in one cup.
That notwithstanding, she was thrilled with the pictures (both of them). We’ve got plans for more treasure hunting and sharing between the two of us. And I’ve got some allegedly restored photos that I think I’m going to have Kevin work his magic on in the near future. So big props to Kevin! Thanks for being the high point of my weekend.
I’ll have some decent blogging, especially the preparation for the big 2nd birthday party as the week continues.