The studio,
step by step.
Four moments — what you send us, how we work, how you approve it, how it arrives at your door. Each one is brief because the work itself takes most of the time.
Send us the photographs.
Mail the originals to our studio (we provide a prepaid shipping label and an insurance receipt) or email scans, ideally at 600 dpi. Tell us — in your own words — whose photograph this is, what it's for, and anything we should know about the person in it. That note travels with the work the whole way through.
Reply with a plan
We restore the photograph, by hand.
The heavy lift — descratching, sharpening, color recovery, fade reversal — uses digital tools. The decisions — what to fix, what to keep, what to leave exactly as it is — are made by a person who has read your intake note. Identity-critical details (scars, marks, the look on someone's face) are protected; we never silently smooth them away.
Single image: 3–5
You preview the proof.
We send a digital proof of each photograph for your review — both the restoration and, if you ordered it, the colorization. One round of revisions is included; if you'd like the scar to be more visible, or the colorization warmer, we adjust and send again. Nothing is printed, framed, or shipped until you've said yes.
1 round included
We deliver, ready to give.
Digital files arrive in a private Dropbox link — no account needed. If you ordered the physical bundle, the framed centerpiece, prints, and slideshow USB ship in a presentation box. Your originals come back, insured, in a separate package. A short note from us travels with the package.
Rush available
The damage your family album picked up.
- Scratches, creases, and folds from being kept in albums or boxes
- Fading and yellowing from light, time, and acidic paper
- Tears, missing corners, water spots, and stains
- Blurriness from old prints, low-resolution scans, or camera shake
- Dust, mold, and foxing (the orange spots from acid migration)
- Heavy contrast loss in shadows and skin tones
- Colorization of black-and-white originals, on request
The details your family would catch.
Restoration tools fail in a specific way: they can't tell the difference between a scratch on the negative and a scar on someone's cheek. They smooth both away. Hands look smooth, faces look like wax figures, and the person you knew is gone.
That doesn't happen here. We protect identity-critical features by default. Your grandfather's freckle, your mother's earring, the chip in the bowl on the table — these stay unless you ask us to change them.
If we aren't sure whether something is a feature or a defect, we write to you and ask. We've never sent a proof we hadn't first puzzled over for at least a minute.
Your photographs leave the house — briefly.
Most customers email scans. For irreplaceable originals — the only wedding photograph, a fragile glass plate, a damaged daguerreotype — we'll mail you a prepaid USPS Priority insured shipping kit with archival sleeves. We log each photograph on receipt, photograph it as it arrived, scan it at archival resolution, and mail the originals back in a separate package by insured mail. The kit is included with every Family Bundle and above; we charge $15 for it on Single Photograph orders.
If you'd rather not mail them at all: an iPhone scan at the highest resolution setting, in good window light, on a dark surface, is enough for ~85% of restoration work. We'll tell you in the intake reply if a particular photograph really needs to come to us.
You don't have to decide anything today