Image Goose :: Photo Restoration, Photo Retouching, Digital Imaging Services

Examples and Ideas

The following photos show examples our different service levels. Every photo has its own unique characteristics and requirements. Certain types of services require a larger investment of time which will be reflected in our quote. A deposit may be required for larger jobs. ImageGoose will review, advise and provide you with a quote before any work is done. You don't pay until you are satisfied.

Service Type	Examples (Drag Mouse over photo to see original)
Appearance (basic) This service type includes: Color balance and correction, contrast, exposure, red eye removal, saturation, sharpening and digital noise reduction. The following adjustments will be made upon request: cropping, black and white conversion, horizontal/vertical straightening. Price: $10 per photo.
Appearance Plus Includes all of the above Basic Appearance adjustments, PLUS: skin smoothing, blemish removal, eye and tooth whitening, color changes & minor object removal. Price: $20 per photo.
Portraits and Retouching Includes all of the above appearance adjustments plus detailed retouching of blemishes, wrinkle reduction, skin softening and background and lighting effects. Price: Starting at $30. (Price will depend on the level of retouching required. Will quote.)	Personal Portraits Glamour Portrait Ultra Glamour
Editing and Manipulations Remove/add people or objects, change backgrounds. Get a nose job or lose a few pounds. Create selective focus to highlight your subject matter. Your input is required for this category. Your wish is our command. Price: Starting at $20. (will quote.)
Restorations Retouch and restore old photos. Remove stains, cracks and scratches and general abuse of your older photos. This type of service requires review and analysis. Price: Starting at $30. (will quote.)
Creative and Artistic Imagine a great picture, poster or digital image. Now imagine that picture with you or your subject as the "star" of that photo, or maybe you have your own vision. Tell us how you want it. Your imagination combined with our skills will see your vision through. Price: Will quote price.

If you have made it this far, thank you and congratulations!
Please remember that the examples on this page are only to tweak your imagination.
Your photos are important to you. Let's think of ways to create the photo or image that you really want.

FYI

Why you need ImageGoose

The images presented on this examples page are only some of the unlimited edits and adjustments that are possible by using ImageGoose to enhance your photos. The following list is our attempt to provide additional information and ideas that might help you decide if your photos would benefit from some additional enhancement.

Correct color cast - virtually every digital camera or scanner sneaks in some color cast to their photos.
Indoor photos - indoor lighting can produce an unflattering color tint.
Color management - do you know what color profile to use to get the best results when printing or posting online. ImageGoose does.
Over and under exposed photos.
Cropping and Straightening - is your subject too small in the overall photo. Does you photo need straightening?
Noise Reduction - noise is a common problem in digital photos.
Sharpening - almost all photos can benefit from some sharpening. Sharpening adds noise to a photo so it must be used in small increments. Does your software allow you to adjust the amount of sharpening you use?
Chromatic Aberration - the fancy name for that thin line of colored fringe that can appear around the edges of objects in photos. Sometimes its red, sometimes blue, green, or purple etc, but all times it bad!
Poor Contrast - most point and shoot cameras (especially those set to AUTO) produce photos that have a slightly flat and washed out look. I have yet to come across a photo that didn't need some contrast adjustment, but like sharpening it most be applied carefully.
Vignetting - the darkening around the edges and corners. This is a cool effect that is sometimes added to photos to draw focus to the subject, but if it's unintentional it is a problem that needs to be fixed.
Black and White conversion as well as duotones, quadtones and split toning can turn an otherwise ordinary photo into something special. Use your imagination to create a artsy and creative vision.
Depth of Field - this is an effect and staple of DSLR cameras, the ability to control were focus and blur occur in your photo. Point and shoot cameras are sadly lacking in this type of control as they try to create focus across the whole image. Blurring of background, and focus on foreground subjects creates a more intimate and appealing photo. A must for "people" pictures.
Adjust an individual color.Sometimes a photo requires some toning down of a particular color, or a change of the color completely. We can do it.
Cropping and resizing require that you know how you want to display your photo. In print, on the web, or in wide screen format? There are rules. Do you know them?
Collages - take several photos and create one by combing photos or elements of photos. Create family, or team photos, or anything you can dream up. Totally up to you. A collage photo makes a great personalized gift.
Headshots - do you have a recent portrait-like photo? You need a decent headshot in your arsenal.
Promotional Photos - anytime you need to put your best image out there. Do you have the tools?
Facial & Body Adjustments - reduce a double chin - remove dark circles under the eyes - reduce wrinkles and blemishes - enhancing lips - brightening and whitening eyes and teeth - remove shiny areas on the skin - smooth skin - reduce (or expand) the size of various body parts, nose, ears, love handles you name it. We have the secrets.

Attention "Auto Pilots"

The best investment you can make in your digital camera is to read the manual. Learn your camera's settings. Most camera's are defaulted to the dreaded "AUTO" setting. This setting is good for people with low expectations, but it should not be good enough for you! From the point and shoot compact camera's to the high end DSLR's, your photos will soar when you know your way around your camera and it's setting.

Backup your photos

If you are serious about your digital photos it is important that you back them up to a separate folder, disc drive, flash drive or other offsite options. We are all tempted while viewing our photos to make a tweak here and there with the software that came with the camera, or other low level programs on our computers. Having an original backup ensures you never make an adjustment that you can't restore.

Calibrate your monitor

Learn how to change your monitor's color settings. Read your monitor's manual. Google it if necessary. You can't view quality images if your monitor is not set for accurate color representation.

Aspect Ratio

The aspect ratio of an image is its width divided by its height. This is important to understand as an image should be consistent with the media the photo is being displayed on, either print or monitor. Images may have to be cropped depending on the intended size of the output. Here is the Wikipedia definition just to clarify this concept. Here.

Get great prints from your digital camera

Digital imaging is an exciting new area of growth in the world of photography largely because of all the new options it offers professional photographers and amateurs. For a truly successful transition to digital from traditional photography, however, you have to understand some of the major differences between the two forms of photography. For example, traditional photography is typically a two-step process: capture the image on film and output the image. In this scenario, most of the time and effort is spent on checking the lighting, making sure that the right film type and speed are being used, focusing the camera, and finally taking the picture. After the shutter snaps, the creative part is over. Output is a matter of checking the boxes on the envelope - double or single prints, glossy or matte finish, 3-by-5-inch or 4-by-6-inch prints - and then waiting a few days for the prints to arrive. Digital photography, on the other hand, extends and enhances the creative process. In digital photography, you can edit the photos, use them in presentations and publications, e-mail them to family, send them to digital picture frames, load them into personal digital assistants, print them on your home printer, have them professionally printed, and make posters and photo gifts. With these new opportunities, however, there are some new concepts that are important to understand if you want to get the best digital images. Resolution and image size The single most important concept is resolution, expressed as dots per inch (dpi), or sometimes called pixels per inch (ppi). The dpi measure commonly indicates the quality of the image. The higher the dpi value is, the higher the density of visual information that is available to represent the image. The more visual information there is per inch of space - that is, the higher the resolution - the sharper and more color-rich the image is. Digital photographer Resolution is represented as a single value, such as 300 dpi. This value represents the density of information of an image at a certain size, such as 4 × 6 inches. If the image is enlarged, the dpi value decreases; conversely, if the image is reduced in size, the dpi value or resolution increases - that is, the dpi is higher. In simplified terms, just remember that the lower the resolution, the fuzzier the image quality appears. The higher the resolution, the sharper the image quality appears. Another common measure of the absolute quality of the image is pixel dimension. Pixel dimensions are typically expressed as the number of pixels (or dots of information) in the width of the image by the number of pixels in the height of the image. Expressed another way, pixel dimensions represent the number of dots (or pixels) used to create the image. Unlike dpi, pixel dimensions are independent of the size of the image. For example, if an image is 1280 × 960 pixels, and you want to print an image that is 200 dpi, then divide 1280 and 960 each by 200 dpi to get the maximum size that the image can be printed without losing clarity - in this case, 6.4 inches by 4.8 inches. If you print images on your home printer, check the resolution of your printer, and then use that as a guide for determining print size based on this equation. If you want professional-quality prints, just upload your digital files to one of the many reputable photo finishers online. Unless you using a dedicated inkjet photo printer at home, commercial printing gives you a much higher-quality print, color, and paper than you can get printing images on a general purpose inkjet printer. The following are general resolution guidelines you can use to determine the size of the final print when you send prints in for professional printing. Print size (in inches) Min. dimensions (in pixels) 4 × 6 800 × 600 5 × 7 1050 × 750 8 × 10 1536 × 1024 In each of the above cases, if you crop an image (that is, trim away part of the outside edges of an image) before you have it professionally printed, you should take into account the shape of the final print. In general, standard picture sizes are rectangular - 4 × 6, 5 × 7, or 8 × 10 - so be sure to crop the image so that it conforms to a rectangular format. Most commercial processing automatically fits the largest size image to the print size you select. So if your original picture is not rectangular, then you should crop the image before you send it in to ensure that nothing gets left out of the picture that you wanted in it. Please note: Since cropping reduces the overall image size, be sure to crop the image first, and then calculate how large an image you can have printed. File size and file format options A high-resolution image requires a large amount of space on your computer's hard drive to store the image detail. Balancing file size against available storage space is the biggest balancing act involved in digital imaging. How high a resolution should you use when taking pictures to ensure a high-quality picture? The short answer is that you have to plan ahead. Unlike in traditional photography, you have to take into account how you want to use the pictures before you shoot, and then set your camera to capture either higher or lower resolution. There are numerous file formats, each identified by a file name extension, such as .bmp, .tiff, .jpg, .jif, .gif, and .psd. Each file format saves the image using a different method. One of the most useful formats is JPEG (short for Joint Photographic Experts Group), which uses a .jpg file extension. JPEG compresses files to create a smaller size file. However, the JPEG file format is called "lossy" because it loses some of the quality (or some of the pixels) from the image. Depending on the level of compression you choose, JPEG can create a relatively small file with higher loss of quality, or a larger file with little noticeable loss of quality. The higher the level of compression you choose, the smaller the size of the file. A typical compression ratio is 10 to 1. This means that a 4-megabyte (MB) file saved as a compressed JPEG file will be reduced to 400 kilobytes (KB). The drawback to this compression is that every time the file is saved again, a small amount of image quality is lost. This method is similar to making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Each successive copy is slightly reduced in quality from the original. If the image is going to be edited and saved numerous times, then another file format such as TIFF should be used for the interim saves of the file. The TIFF file format is non-lossy - it does not lose image quality in trade for a smaller file size, but it also does not compress files, so files are larger and require more space to store. These points are just some of the basics of taking and printing digital images. Again, the key to working with digital images is planning ahead for what you intend to use the image for. Remember, if you think that you'll want to use a picture for a poster, a T-shirt, or an 8 × 10 enlargement, make sure that you set your digital camera for a higher resolution. But if you just want to use the picture for an e-mail message, or to print on your home printer, set the resolution down much lower so you can get more pictures on your memory card. In either case, have fun with your photos and let ImageGoose take care of the photos you want to be just perfect before you commit them to print.

Contact

ImageGoose

C/O Paul Murphy
2555 - 3rd Avenue W.,
Suite 202
Owen Sound, On., N4K 6T8
519-270-3788
email: pmurphy@imagegoose.com

Skype: imagegoose

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