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How Do You Restore This?

Removing surface damage, including cracks and creases is an everyday occurrence in photo restoration. This is the most common damage to old photos. The damage is most often because of people folding the photographs. This cracks the photographic emulsion surface and reveals the paper underside of the photo.

How Do You Restore This?

To repair this kind of damage we must use the magic of Photoshop. A few different  tools are used for this kind of restoration. but to restore the cracked areas and surface damage I use the 'healing brush' and the 'spot healing brush'. With the healing brush you can select which area you want to copy the pixels from and then select where to paste them.

As you paste the copied pixels, Photoshop analysis the surrounding pixels and adjusts the colour of pasted pixels to closely match those of the surrounding area. The Spot Healing Brush automatically selects the best area to copy from and matches to the surround pixels. This is a much quicker one step process as apposed to the Healing Brush 2 steps. But it can be less useful in very detailed areas.

Before and After

photo restoration
Light - Medium Restoration $80

Something for the weekend!

Colourizing old black and white photos is an art. It is amazing what can be achieved with this method of adding colour to old black and white photos. History can come alive. This old portrait of Queen Victoria was completely transformed when I added colour to it. I did this one just for fun. But I do like these results and thought I would share them with you.

If you would like to restore and add colour to your old black and white photos then please send us your photos. I'm sure you will also be amazed at the difference it can make.

Colourizing old black and white photos Before & After

colourized photo restoration - Colourizing old black and white photos
Colourized Photo restoration

Add colour and make your photo time travel!

Old black and white photos are wonderful. They show a time that was long ago. But when you add colour to a black and white photo. You bring them forward in time so to speak. Therefore they look real and they have more life to them. It is as though they were taken yesterday. It becomes an amazing transformation.

Add Colour

The process to do this colourizing magic is not all science. In fact most of it is down to artistic flair and skill. Once the original black and white image is restored and looking like new again, the re-colourizing process can begin.  The process all takes place in Photoshop but the colours are painted in by hand using a 'digital brush'.  The colours are all chosen by the artist too. We do not know from the black and white photo which shade of grey is which colour. So researching the period and other information including feedback from the client is all very important to the final result.

The photo restoration colourizing example below is a fine example how colour can really make a an big impact.

Before and After

Add colour to Black and white photo
Medium Restoration $140 plus prints

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Let There Be Light!

Let there be light!

When Julia brought in this wonderful family photo for restoration. It was dark and had been laminated. A common practice with photos from the islands. But we were able to use the magic of Photoshop to bring back the brightness and also the colour. The difference is amazing and Julia was very pleased with the results.

Julia-

Hi Richard
Thankyou it looks great!

Before & After

colour photo restoration
Light Colour Restoration $60 plus prints

A Wedding To Remember

A Wedding To Remember

Faa brought us this very old wedding photo that he wanted to put back up on display again. The original was cut out with a pair of scissors and glued to some heavy board material.

Because the couple in the photo were both wearing wight it was very difficult to find any details. And so, using Photoshop, I had to paint in by hand the shading and outlines. We also added a bench for the couple to sit on. Replaced the background and sharpened up the image to make this photo come back to life. Faa was very happy with the results.

Before and After

Photo Restoration - A Wedding To Remember
Medium Photo Restoration $120 plus prints

This is what to do If this happens

Pixelfix Restoration

Carol brought in 2 photos in there frames with broken glass. The photos had stuck to the glass and the glass had been broken when trying to remove them. This happens... a lot.

If this happens to you. Please don't do anything further once you discover that the photo is struck to the glass. Bring it straight into me at Pixelfix Restoration and I can scan it through the glass before anything gets broken and things are made worse. Carol was lucky and we were able to restore the damaged areas and fix up the cracks in the glass.

Restored Photo

Poto restoration Colour
Medium restoration $150 plus prints

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Genealogy – Happy Families

Happy Families

Ian is updating his families genealogy files and he brought me a bunch of these very badly faded old black and white photos to be restored. The fading was not uniform and was quite bad in places. This type of old photo is very small and was not very sharp. The other blemishes and marks were also removed and the final restored photo was a big improvement on the originals.

Genealogy;

Genealogy also known as family history, is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives.

From Wikipedia.

Photo Restoration
Medium Restoration 3+ Hours $120 plus prints

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This looks like its been through the mill!!

This looks like its been through the mill!

Davinder Brought in two very badly damaged photos that had been through the mill. It seemed so literally. Large sections of the image had been damaged so much that the surface had disappeared completely. But using Photoshop to build layers from the surround areas and using the clone and heal tools I was able to reconstruct the missing areas and match this with the rest of the photo.

The results are really quite dramatic. Davinder was very pleased with the new photos. so much so that he asked us to frame them for him so they could go back up on the wall. Below is one of these images.

Review;

Davinder also  wrote us a fantastic review on google you can read more about that here....

Professional service, excellent job done in agreed time.

-Davinder | Auckland

Photo Restoration - This looks like its been through the mill!
Heavy Photo Restoration 5+ hours $200

Merry Christmas Reviews

It has been a very busy Christmas but we are almost at the finishing line now. A few more pick ups still to go but all the hard work is done. The feedback has been fantastic and here are a few reviews that we got on Google. Thank you everyone and Merry Christmas.

I dealt with Richard from PixelFix who assisted me to restore a very special photo of mine. He was very quick to respond to my enquiry and did an amazing job of removing a couple of objects from the background of the photo. The photo had “70’s” wall paper so it would have been very tricky to match up the design. I would highly recommend Richard if you need assistance with photo restoration. Thanks again Richard!

Madeline – Auckland

Richard’s service and work quality is excellent. He has done a great job on the only photo I have of my Grandad in the war, even though it was a poor copy. I recommend his work.

Chris – Bay of Islands

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