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Why come to Portraits by Hart?

We are celebrating 64 years in business

Example Restorations from our Photo Restoration Service

Your faded old, damaged & cracked photographs can be preserved for generations with our Photo Restoration Service.

Here you will find examples of photo restorations we have recently completed for customers who have come to us from all over The West Midlands, Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Birmingham & beyond.

This is a set of photo restorations we recently completed for the Bethel Chapel in Lye, Stourbridge, West Midlands. As you can see the original photographs suffered from varying degrees of damage & decay. Some had been attacked by mildew & damp throughout the years. Some had faded slightly & all of the photos had acquired a build up of grime & dirt through decades of display & handling. Most of the photographs showed some evidence of silvering, this is silver coming out of the original image & shows as a metallic shine when the photograph is tilted into the light. Silvering makes the original photograph particularly difficult to copy & scan.

A set of old vintage sepia photos we recently restored for The Bethel Chapel in Lye, Stourbridge.

 

Before the restoration process could take place, the original photographs had to be photographed & a digital file created. The original photos were too large to scan & they also required special care, lighting & filters to overcome the shine created by silvering. Once digital files were created the process of retouching, artwork & restoration could begin. This was mostly achieved in Photoshop & by means of varying techniques, tools & skills. After many hours of retouching & digital manipulation the photograph restoration process was finally completed. The new restored pictures were then printed using archival quality Ultrachrome K3 inks & high quality Fuji printing materials. Once printed the photographs were then finished off with hand cut mounts & overlays ready for picture framing.

A badly cracked, worn & damaged old photograph restored to near new condition.

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From time to time an old photograph is bought into our studio for restoration which looks almost irreparable. This is the only photograph our customer has of his mother & siblings from an early age. It’s a very cherished & important photograph to him & his family & it was very important to get it restored & preserved for future generations if this was at all possible.

 

This wasn’t an easy photo restoration to complete. However, the original photograph still held a lot of detail & although there was a lot of damage it was still possible to see or imagine what it should look like when restored. There really isn’t a quick way to restore a photograph properly, the only way to do it right is to spend a suitable amount of time on the retouching process. We did & were very pleased with the final result, our customer was delighted too.

 

There are photograph restoration services available which provide a quick cheap patch up job but this isn’t the way we work. We want to provide the best restoration results possible & this takes time, so you will find we aren’t the cheapest photo restoration service around. However, we do like to think we are one of the best photograph restorers & thankfully this is backed up by our returning customers.

A colour enhanced & digitally altered vintage wedding photograph.

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With this old wedding photograph it is almost a case of spot the difference & there’s an interesting story attached too! A father (the bride groom in the pictures above) & his daughter bought this original photograph into our studio in the hope we could help make mom’s dreams come true on a special wedding anniversary. Apparently on the day this wedding couple were married the grooms wife to be wanted him to get wed in his naval uniform. However for one reason or another he was married in his normal suit. So that mom could finally have her wishes come true we were asked if we could restore the photograph as the colours had faded & also put the groom into his sailors uniform. This was an unusual request but we are never daunted by a challenge.

 

First of all we had to scan the original photograph to a high resolution & digitally restore the image. We also added a nice blue cloudy sky. Following this we had to undertake some research We needed to find out what naval uniform was required & also find photographic examples from which to work . Once we had the information & images required of suitable uniforms we could then carry on with the next stage of the photograph enhancement. There is no quick way of doing artwork like this to achieve a final result of a high standard. The uniform literally had to be created from scratch in Photoshop & there was a fair amount of retouching & digital painting time involved. We think it was all worth it though as we achieved a result we were very pleased with & our customer was delighted with too.

A colorized black & white photograph
A faded vintage Victorian wedding group photograph restoration.

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The photograph above is a good example of a badly faded vintage picture. Here at the studio we encounter lots of photos similar to this. Images like this can prove quite a challenge, however throughout the years we’ve gained many photographic retouching & enhancement skills which help us to bring them back to life. Not all faded photographs can be improved but most can be. Photographs that have faded to this degree should never be put on display as it won’t take long for them to fade away all together. Photos like this need to be copied & preserved as soon as possible, otherwise they & the history contained within them may be lost for future generations forever. It’s not just faded photographs either, really it’s not a good idea to display any original old photographs where the sun can get to them. Always display a modern copy of your valuable old photographs & put the originals away in a dark, dry & safe place.

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All photograph restorations are carried out in house. We never pass your treasured photographs  on to a third party to run the risk of loss or damage. We understand how precious your memories are and we treat your photographs as if they were our own.

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Here you will find a list of some photograph faults we can repair & restore. 

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We can also scan & archive your family photograph collections & photo albums to a digital format so they can be treasured by generations to come. Your home video collections, cine films & audio tapes can also be converted and digitized, we offer an extensive digital conversion service.  

All photographic & video to digital transfer services we provide are carried out in house by ourselves. We will never pass your treasured negatives, transparencies, video tapes & cine films on to a third party.

Many businesses & High Street chains offering these services do not carry out the work themselves, they forward it on to a third party. We carry out all of the work ourselves. When you hand your items over to us you are very often handing them to the person who will actually carry out carry out the work.

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