Monday, April 11, 2011

Photo Restoration Services - Things You Need to Know

By Jennifer Hoskins


All those old grandma photos that are decades old suddenly stare at you when you are cleaning out your attic. You have just realized how precious all these photos are, no matter how mugged or damaged they are. You decide to hire photo restoration services to get the photos in good shape so that you can adorn your home with some of them. Of course, you have taken the right decision.

Photo restoration has become so popular that is has become an industry in itself. Virtually every corner has a photo restoring service center. Many of these services are so unbelievably cheap that you feel like restoring even those photos that are new and perfectly clean. But wait! You have heard that the cheapest doesn't equate to the best deal, haven't you? Well, that's true in this case too.

Your photos are very, very important to you, so it is better to take note of a few things before handing them over to a photo restoration service. One of the most common schemes employed by these services to squeeze some extra money out of you is to offer extra features, by using those jargon words such as red eye correction or tonal correction and make it seem a sophisticated job.

Also, many services will purport to offer you premium photo restoration services which cost you significantly more than regular services. The truth is that these services can be should be offered for free. In face some of the things like tonal correction can be done by you at home with some software such as Adobe Photoshop and even the free GIMP program.

Also, most of the restoration services will most probably do all those corrections by hand, when they should be doing manually. Many restoration services employ people who have just some basic training in Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. They may not really have the expertise to do all the editing to perfection. Only give your photos for restoration to those services to those you know to have expert people at the job.

Another photo restoration vendor will tell you that they will save you the trouble of scanning the photos for a small fee. First of all, this small fee isn't always small. Secondly, they most probably use the same scanner that you do at home, which means it is always better for you to scan it yourself and then either deliver it to them through a flash drive or via email.

In order to earn some extra money, many photo restoration services may offer a print out of the restored photos for free. The question to ask is why you need a print out of those photos if you are going to share it online. This is nothing more than a marketing gimmick to attract you to their photo services.

Also, if you really do need a print out of the photo, you are better doing it yourself using a high quality photo paper. Your vendor will mostly use a normal paper to do it, which is useless. Research some photo restoration companies online before giving your photos to one of them. you will get a better idea about the average fees for photo restoration.




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