ScanCafe's Photo Restoration Service: This Rocks!

One of my favourite photo-related newsletters, Photojojo, had an interesting offer a few weeks ago: ScanCafe, a scanning service, was offering a free photo restoration. I decided I'd take them up on the offer, sending in a very beat-up photo of my grandfather. I'd restored a copy of this photo myself, so I was going to compare ScanCafe's work to my own. See the results after the break.

Figure 1: The source image. Small tears, lots of crinkles and wrinkles, and yellowed with age. Quite a challenge!

Figure 2: This was my attempt at restoration back in 2008. To allow a normal sized print, I cropped it heavily. I'd say this took me about an hour of solid cloning and touch-up work - I'm by no means an expert at photo restoration, but I thought I did a pretty good job...until I saw the job that ScanCafe did (below).

Figure 3: The ScanCafe photo restoration.

As you can see, there's no contest between my photo restoration job and that of ScanCafe. They did a great job repairing the damage to the original photo, and did a nice shift to B&W which, for whatever reason, I never thought of doing. Best of all, if they'd charged me for this service, it would have only cost $5.95. In my books, that's very reasonable. They offer a free estimate - rates start at $6.95 for a restoration and movie up from there, presumably if it's a more complex job. Why did they tell me it would have cost me $5.95 instead of $6.95? I have no idea. If you have an old, damaged photo that you'd like to see restored, give ScanCafe a try - I know I'll definitely be going back to them in the future with other images in need of repair.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys photography, mobile devices, blogging, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. His big toe hurts a bit right now.

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