So last week I prepared some older photos for a lady who was helping with her mother-in-law's funeral. It was hard work and it the family was quite happy with the result. I admit I did charge more than I would for a DVD picture archive because there was a good bit of work involved restoring a few pictures. Some came in quite damaged but I did manage to make it work somehow.
Now for a little back story. This lady had been looking to have an old family video converted to DVD for her mother-in-law who was terminally ill at the time and was hoping to give her a nice gift. I was happy to oblige but the VHS tape was so badly degraded I could barely get any footage from it with my capture card. I told her the story and decided not to charge her for anything because nothing was really done anyway.
A couple weeks later, she sent me a second tape and this one had been recorded over, by what I saw on the tape someone had recorded over it in the early 90s. I let her know about this one as well and she tried to track down one last copy. I guess she never found it. It was sad because I really was hoping I could do something nice for the family considering they were dealing with terminal cancer.
Soon after the mother-in-law had passed on and the lady sent me the pictures. As I said before some of these were in really bad shape so I did what I could to repair them. I even went so far as to email her some before and afters just to let her know what I was doing with them. I also did some color correction on the other photos that didn't have any damage to them because hard copy pictures degrade over time with colors and what not. In this case, Photoshop's Curves tool is your friend.
So after I finished the project I sent back the photos with a few slide-show DVDs and one with just the photos so they could print them or use them on Shutterfly and needless to say they were very pleased. If there's one thing I've learned with these, it's that you never do anything half-assed. The last thing I'd ever want anyone to be remembered by is a heavily damaged photo. And honestly, it's just good service.
I'm still disappointed that I couldn't convert the video but I was also glad I was able to help them with this.
See you around,
Homer