Tuesday, October 08, 2002

Online service restores the very image of Grandpa

By SANDRA BROWN KELLY
THE ROANOKE TIMES

    Many of us have crumbling family portraits and snapshots that are wasting away in closets and attics. Someday we intend to restore the pictures, like the one of my paternal grandfather, Mitchell Brown.

    His image threatened to just disappear from its paper. It had been created in what looked almost like watercolor but likely was a turn-of-the-century colorizing technique. Every so often I looked at the portrait and then put it back into its dark storage promising to get it fixed soon.

    Enter Karen Thomas, the persistent owner of a public relations firm in New York.

    Thomas urged me to submit a photo for restoration to her client, DigitalCustom's Image Edit & Art, to see the company's work. I scanned my grandfather's portrait into my computer and uploaded it to www.image-edit.com.

    Image Edit & Art is a Web-based service headquartered in San Francisco. It has a customer service facility in Cincinnati. The company does custom photo editing for individuals and photo retailers worldwide. It can even produce a caricature of a photo; Thomas has one done of her at www.thomas-pr.com.

    The estimate for repairing my grandfather's ranged from a low of $43 upward depending upon how quickly I needed the repair. At $43, the work could be done in eight days. Customers can tell the company what to repair or not repair or leave it up to the company's artists to decide.

    Image Edit & Art promises on its site that a customer will say "Wow!" when she sees the completed work, and I did just that. After an e-mail announced the photo was ready, I went to the site and began the download of the highest quality image; an e-mail quality image is also provided for sending to family and friends.

    As the portrait filled my screen, a sky blue background, no longer flaked, enhanced the dark-haired and gentle features of a handsome young man who died before I was born. Few photos of him survive, which made this one even more special.

    While at the site, I ordered several small copies at $2.50 each; they will be mailed to me for holiday gift-giving. I can now take the large portrait on a disk to a local photo shop for printing. Or, perhaps I'll try out still more consumer-friendly technology, the $6.99 Kodak photo machines sprinkled around in drugstores and photo shops. I used one of these in California, and the results were top drawer.

    Photo Expo

    If you need a reason to visit New York City - other than great theater and an exciting atmosphere - PhotoPlus Expo might help you decide to go. The event will be held Oct. 31-Nov. 2 and promises more than 200 exhibitors showing off the latest photography technology. Seminars are also offered. Learn more at www.photoplusexpo.com. You can attend for as little as $35.

    For Mac users

    Twig Gravely of the Macintosh Users Group in Roanoke writes that Apple's recent release of free beta version of iSync means you can keep your calendar and contact information synchronized up to the minute between your Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone, iPod, Palm OS device or multiple Macs.

    Apple also has extended the deadline for discounted subscriptions to its online pay service, www.mac.com. This service was formerly known as iTools and was free. In its new life as a service for sale, .mac includes virus protection software, homepage space, backup software and storage, an e-mail account and iDisk with 100mb of online storage.

    You can find more information at www.mac.com. If you need to go to the Apple store and sign in to find out about the deal, the current user name is jaguar and the password is speed.

    The Mac group, MUGgeRs, meets at the Roanoke Valley Governor's School the second Thursday of the month at 7 p.m. (go to www.rvgs.k12.va.us and click on MUGgeR).

    You can reach free-lance writer SANDRA BROWN KELLY at sbk@rev.net.

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