Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for May, 2009

The following offer has been extended to give you continuing value for money!

£5 off and FREE 10×8 inch print with any Grade 3 restoration

Order one or more Grade 3 restoration and a print, and get one 10×8* inch print Free and £5 off!

Quote this order code G31085OFF when ordering.

Valid till end of July 2009

* Subject to the condition and size of the original photo

Order your photo restoration now!

Another never ending staircase. I had another crack at the never ending staircase and this is the result. See the link for a larger version of the never ending staircase

Scrapbooking, Genealogy, family trees and digging around for old photos  is very much on the mind of many people today. There are many publications on the magazine shelves and several TV series to keep reminding us of how important our family histories are.

Making a family tree is not all about names it is about photos as well. The visual side of the ancestry helps with putting a face to the names. To help smarten up your family tree arrange your photos or portraits alongside the names on the tree, so when you can’t remember what great uncle Cartwright looked like, he is right there for you. Of course don’t stick down  the original photos get your photos copied and restored and a digital copy to make an on-line family tree for your relatives to share. Keep the original safe and sound away from sunlight and in a dry place.

TOP TIP: If you want to see great uncle Cartwright above the fireplace then have your original photo restored and reproduced, so you can display the reproductions around the house in prominent, well lit places, will no fear of further fading and damage.

Once you have developed a set of photo restoration skills you can use them to create a realistic photomontage.

In the following photoshop tutorial I will help you create a never ending staircase.

Never ending staircase

Photo restorations are my speciality but today I thought I would create a tutorial on making a never ending staircase from PhotoShop, Textured with wood, stone, grass or whatever you choose. Sometimes when you see photo restorations, you wonder how they were done, its the same for illusions. Here is how to make your own photo montage illusion.

Create a document in photo shop around 4000 x 2000 pixels. File / new / and fill in the pixels width and height.

We need to show the rulers and change to centimetres.

View / rulers Then right click on the now visible ruler and select centimetres.

We need to show the gird now. View / show grid

Now go to View / Snap to / Grid, to make sure the lines we draw are all consistent.

To check that your screen settings are the same as mine go to edit / preferences / unit and rulers

copy these settings in the above image

Back to the image.

On a new layer draw with the polygon lasso tool from the tools palette, a diamond. Use 5×3 squares per quarter to draw your diamond shape. This gives us an angle of just about 30 degrees which is very important for this to work.

On new layers, draw the other two shapes as per the image above. Now merge the layers. Select the freshly drawn layers in the layers palette and merge them using Layer / merge layers.

Copy the layer and paste and repeat this and arrange the steps as the image below.

Select all these layers in the layers pallet and duplicate them all. Right click in the layers palette and select, duplicate layers. With the layers still selected flip them. Edit / transform / flip horizontal. Use this process by ordering your layers and copying and pasting to get the result below.

Now let’s use something to make to the steps look more real.

Find a picture of a stone slab or a piece of wood, plastic, metal or even grass and cut it out into the shape we first drew, (the diamond and its edges). You can do this on a separate layer and change the opacity of the layer in your layers palette so you can see the original diamond step underneath. Using wood this can be achieved fairly easily. You may need to use the warp or scale tools, or liquefy (sorry I won’t be explaining how to use these tools here – but search the net I am sure you find what you are looking for)

Now repeat the steps we used to create the stair case and position your steps above the others and you will have your staircase. Now use it creatively! You can experiment with amount of steps just by shortening the sides of the stair case using the grid we first set up.

Here is one in stone! I created this myself with some stone slabs and some clever cloning and shading.

A larger version of this optical illusion never ending staircase

A larger version of this optical illusion never ending staircase

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial brought to you by A quality photo restoration service www.image-restore.co.uk restorations of old and damaged photos.

Photo restorations on line are easy to come by and when it comes to buying I have always bought local wherever possible, but it is easy to shop on-line isn’t it? Web shopping has one drawback, it is not always easy to tell if the company is using UK labour. Before you log on to order on-line, check whether the labour used is in the UK. If it is not obvious the likelihood is it’s foreign. Just because it’s a high street chain you grew up with a and regularly shop with, you may find if you ask enough questions, the labour is farmed to foreign, low wage companies.

As a result UK businesses want your custom even more and go out of their way to provide the best service and quality of work, so why not use them.

Why go miles in the car for a “cheap service”, when you add up the costs of mileage and shoddy workmanship, it costs more than a local, quality service. Support your local businesses or they may not be there to help you in the future. The jobs will disappear and the economic infrastructure of your local area will crumble.

As the financial climate changes and the UK economy suffers and prices rise it is more important than ever to remember you should support your UK Photo Restoration services. Without your support local UK companies can and do suffer.

If you want your local services to continue to serve you, use them! Consider what would happen to our lives without those services and if we continue to use facilities and labour abroad.

We urge you to Keep It Local and buy UK based Photo Restoration services.

For the those of you that have read down this far, as a special incentive to keep photo restorations local and in the UK here is a special offer.

£5 off and FREE 10×8 inch print with any Grade 3 restoration

Order one or more Grade 3 restoration and a print, and get one 10×8* inch print Free and £5 off!

Quote this order code G31085OFF when ordering.

Valid till end of May 2009

* Subject to the condition and size of the original photo

Grab your local photo restoration with money off. (valid till end of May 2009)