Limitations of Restoration and Alteration
What Restoration and Alteration can do:
Restoration can fix cracks, tears, stains, tonally correct, color correct, restore many missing areas, and improve the overall look of the photo. Restoration can restore parts of faces, hands, or body parts that may be missing. Alteration can move anything around two-dimensionally, and to a point, you can move one person in front of another, add people, subtract people, remove distracting objects or backgrounds, or add objects. We can even fix hair, change clothing colors or object colors.
What Restoration and Alteration cannot do:
1) Restoration cannot restore an entire face that is missing. The only information to draw from (pardon the pun) would be the imagination of the restoration artist. However, if you have another photo of the person's face, we can alter the photo and add the face to the photo with the missing face. If only part of the face is missing, we can restore it depending on which part is missing. Draw an imaginary line up and down the middle of the face. If the part of the face that is missing on one side of the line is present on the other side, then chances are excellent we can restore the entire face. If the same part is missing on both sides of the line, we will either need another photo of the face, or we'll have to use our imagination. It's up to you.
2) We cannot restore details to a photo that are missing, such as in a blurry photo. Sharpening methods, even those used in a traditional darkroom, only create the illusion of sharpening. We do use these filters as a last step in every photo job to improve the overall look of a photo, but NOT to try and restore missing detail.
3) We cannot change the angle that the photograph was taken from, rotate people, or change the direction the subject's head is pointing. We cannot rotate objects in photographs. Although they do it in the movies it is actually not possible using only one photo.