It is not about restoring a photograph so much as recovering a memory. Nobody brings me a damaged print because they care about the print. They care about what is in it.
Every job is quoted
No two damaged photographs are damaged the same way, so there is no price list. Send me a scan, or a sharp photograph of the photograph, and I will tell you what can be recovered, what would have to be rebuilt, and what it costs — before any work starts.
Two kinds of work
Repair
Cleaning rather than rebuilding. Surface dirt, scratches, water damage, fading, a color cast that has drifted over fifty years. The information is still in the print — the work is getting it back out.
Reconstruction
Something is missing. A torn corner, a face, a detail that was never sharp enough to read. It cannot be recovered, because it was never there. It has to be built, and then made to belong.
A 1971 Mercury Cyclone GT
A customer showed me a photograph of the car he had when he was younger. Black and white, low resolution, stained. It looked impossible. I scanned it, handed the original straight back, and said let me see what I can do.
Modern tools do a lot of the early lifting on a print like this. They do not finish it. The color of the car, the badges, the parking lights, a believable license plate, the lettering on the tires — that was all hand work. And one detail would not come at all.
The part that had to be built
The wheel hubs were not convincing, and no amount of retouching was going to fix that: the detail was never in the original to begin with. So I built it. The hub cap was modeled in 3D and rendered from the two angles the photograph needed, then matched to the scene — the virtual camera placed where the original camera stood, the same angle on the car, the same lens. It takes a great many adjustments before everything simply fits.
That is the line between repair and reconstruction. Nothing in the original could tell you what those hub caps looked like. They had to be made, and then made to belong.
When something matters to you, it matters to me.
Start with a scan or a phone photograph. I will tell you honestly what can be recovered before you commit to anything, and I typically reply within one working day.