Photographers know the importance of photos and the importance that our photos have for families, companies, historians…  I think about the new generation how everything is preserved on hard drives, CDs, flash drives, phones… and I think “how lucky”.   Why?  Because when I was a kid, we had slides…lots of slides and then hard copies of everything but no digitals.

One of my customers, Greg,  calls me up and says “Maria, we found a huge box of slides of my Dad in Russia in either late 50s or early 60s and I found this one that I want printed.  I took it to get scanned and it doesn’t look that great and this is really important to my family. Can you take a look at it?”  I said “sure”.   So, Greg sends me a digital scan of the negative and I think… wow, cool photo.  I HAVE to do something for him on this. we have to make this look better.  This is the digital version of what he sent to me from the scan that he had received.  Didn’t look too bad but I thought I was going to have to either restore a completely red image or turn it to black and white. So..I asked him to bring over the negative and I would see what I could get done.

As part of my photography business, I do offer high resolution scans. We performed a high resolution scan and this is what we got.  Better than what he orginally gave me, it was better than what I had hoped for.   I was so excited and when he saw the scan, he was thrilled. The photo below is the scan that I was able to get.

After that, the photo restoration began. I had a great time working on this image. When I completed it, he was super excited and got a copy for his Dad and some of his family members.  This was truly a fun project.  Here is the final result. I was really happy with it. The nose area is hard to see but it was not the easiest part but got it done. I did keep an “old school” feel to the image with the colors because I think it fits.