The hardest part of this idea is the finding of enough people to buy your services from you. Where are you going to advertise? How will you get customers? Unless you are very high quality then it does probably become just a part time occupation.
By visiting local framing stores, photo printers and everyone else that might handle photographs and prints you can work out who already offers such a service and for those that don’t you can tout for business.
The levels of restoration
What do you think of when you consider photo restoration? Water damaged, torn and bits missing from the picture? Yes, photo restoration can be very complicated. But it does not need to be. You can earn your stripes on much simpler tasks, build a reputation and a business and learn to handle the more complicated restores at a later date.
The most simplest you can do is to take an under exposed picture, increase the brightness (and the contrast to compensate) and produce a passable image at the end of it. I’ve done it plenty of times with good results.
You can also ‘restore’ a photo for people who are divorced. They might have a set of photographs that they really like, but with a certain person included that they don’t want to see. Again, your restoration services could come in useful!
What you need
Actually, not very much! A reasonably powered computer with Photoshop installed. Personally, I would recommend a Mac machine for their advanced graphics tools, but any laptop or desktop machine with enough memory and disc space will do the job.
On the whole you can ask customers to email you scans of photos, but some might pass you the original, in which case a flatbed scanner is also needed. Then you might want to burn the finished masterpiece to a CD, so just make sure that you have a CD writer. Also useful for when your hard drive gets full!
The work
Professional photographers will probably be touching up their own work, but if you ask around there might be one or two that do not have the time to do the job fully. You might be needed to remove lights and shadows that should not be in the picture or touch up the subject to look younger.
Other people will have damaged and torn treasures in the drawers that have suffered over the years, maybe even become stuck to frames. Whereas most of the work is likely to be improving the look of subjects, the work should be wide and varied and quite interesting.
