About Me - gwinslow.com - Photographic Restoration & Reproduction

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A Brief History:

I wrote my first computer program in 1968 while still in school using punch cards. In 1984 I started doing computer consulting. In 1998 I finally had the proper equipment to start digitally restoring my personal genealogy pictures and documents.

In 1980 I purchased my first home computer, a Texas Instruments TI-99A. Then in 1982 I graduated to an Apple IIe and with the crude software I was finally able to play around with graphics. Then I made the jump over to IBM's 286. Finally I graduated to a "fast" 386 IBM clone, and with my dot matrix printer I was able to print out photographs that actually looked like the people.

Time has passed since those days and now with a Pentium 150, my Umax 600P scanner at 600dpi, and Adobe Photoshop 4.0 I was finally ready to work with digital photographs and have a finished product that I thought was okay.

I needed a way to print out my digitally enhanced photographs so I started out like everyone else using an inkjet printer to print my photographs. My first color inkjet was a Canon BJC-600e at 360 dpi. Good, but I still wasn't satisfied.

I updated to an Epson Stylus Photo 700 at 1440dpi and with glossy photo paper it really looked like a photograph but I was limited to 8.5x11 so I added a Canon BJC-5100 at 1440dpi and 11x17 paper size. This was much better and with photo glossy paper it looked like a real photograph. However, over time inkjet prints tend to fade so they aren't very good for archival quality prints.

Being involved in genealogy I needed something more stable than inkjet prints so I tried an ALP MD-1000 dye-sublimation printer at 1200dpi. This was better but still wasn't as good as a real photograph. However it made a fanastic business card printer. So the quest continued. Finally, I found a service that would take my digital image and print it out as a true photograph. At last I had a finished product that I was happy with.

Now that I've got a way to truly achieve archival quality "new" old photographs, I began in 1998 scanning in all my families old photographs. I didn't know you could store that many photographs in old orange crates/boxes. Using my nieces children, we now have photographs of nine (9) generations, progressing from Glass Plates, Tin Types, photographs on post cards, modern photographs up through digitial photographs taken on my Kodak DC-120 digital camera at 1280x960dpi. While working on this project I found that some of the photographs were so faded or so dark that the finished scan need digital manipulating or required digital restoration due to damage and/or stains on the original photograph. Well, I had Photoshop 4.0 and so I started learning how to restore and digitally manipulate photographs. A few upgrades later I'm using Photoshop 6.01 and wished I had it when I first started. After working for a couple of years on digitally restoring my old photographs I'm finally at the point where I'm finishing up my personal photographs.

What to do next? Well, I've continued to upgrade my equipment until I've progressed to a AMD Athlon XP 2400+mhz PC and an iMac G3/400mhz, a Epson Perfection Photo 1200U 1200x2400dpi scanner, and Adobe Photoshop CS. When displaying my work, I started getting requests from family and friends to restore their old photographs. So as a natural progression, I've decided to offer this service to the general public.