Customizing

Customizing

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of what we do is customizing or repairing your photos. It makes us proud and happy that we can recover or fix your memories.

Imagine a great photo you have that you would like to hang on your wall as a painting
or how about a photo of your new car or home you want to put on a Greeting Card to send your friends.

Colorizing Changing B / W into Color


Here is a fun project on colorizing black and white photos.


I use Photo Shop Elements and Photoshop for all of my photo editing. Paying close attention to detail, I select each and every element to add color.


  • First, I cleaned up the photo on the left removing the spots and stains to have a clean photo and then converted to B&W.
  • Second, is to take all the visible skin and colorize it.
  • Third, is the dress.
  • Fourth, is the hair.
  • Fifth, is the eyes.
  • Sixth, is the ball.
  • Final step, is to rebuild the trailing leg.
  • This takes a quite amount of time, but the end result is a big “wow”!

    The baby picture was my first attempt and the hardest part was legs and shoes.

    Old Photo
    In living color

    Not bad I thought, so I took my skill to a higher level.

    Colorized an old family bridal photo.

    First it was scanned then converted to black and white. Then the fun begins. Then I selected the skin and colorized that segment, then went on selecting all parts of the Bride herself. Pretty much as described above. Then the entire bouquet of flowers had to basically be recreated, petal by petal until all the intricate parts of the flowers was complete.
    Once happy with the full bride colorization, I added color to the background.

    Here are the results.
    Original Scanned Image

    Only Bride Colorized

    Colorized Background

    As you can see, colorizing is not just a matter of pushing a button and saying voila. The baby picture was so much easier to work with because there was not as much detail. This bride picture took about twenty four hours. Of course, it was NOT done all at the same time.

    Jim is right handed. When developed it was done backwards.

    The incorrect photo was corrected and cleaned up.

    Two into One

    This was a challenge to do customizing.
    Here I took two very different pictures, Left and Center, and combined them into one pretty neat picture. Then I aged the photo a little and done.

    Started with left, added middle, finished right.

    Restoration

    Restoration, or customizing, has become something we really enjoy. Would you believe how I restored this photo from a pdf? By restoring this photo I converted the pdf to a jpg using my favorite photo editing program. Here it is before restoring and after. Once the restoration is complete I get an immediate response, see it right away.

    Customizing this picture was very time consuming. The photo is an old, old family portrait. Part of the original is to the left. The center example has been clean up with scratches removed and the one to the right is shown in black and white.
    Scratches and tears were smoothed out as well as rebuilding missing parts pixel by pixel. Doing a project like this one is perhaps the most time intensive part of what I do.

    Out of Bounds

    Special effects is probably the must fun of all. I take a photo and make it jump out from the page.

    These two special effects are called “out of bounds”. The special effect takes the photo and make it really pop.

    Special Effects are just that – special. They look very nice but do take considerable time to create.
    This is a pretty neat effect which takes a little time but is well worth it. (Trolley – Memorial Day, 2012. College Point, New York.)




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