About

Caswell Photo Restoration

Caswell Photo Restoration provides high quality digital restoration, colourisation and scanning services for colour and black and white photographs (from film or digital originals), negatives and slides, producing new archival prints or digital copies suitable for upload to websites or publication.

Your most precious and irreplaceable photographs may have faded in their frame, become scratched & battered from years in a wallet or purse or have curled and cracked after decades in a box put away for safe-keeping. Newer images may have turned purple or green as their colour dyes have failed or it may simply be that you need a copy or two of a favourite picture and no longer have the negatives.

Virtually all such damaged photographs can be recovered. Faded memories can brought back to life; tears, scratches and cracks almost always repaired and whole collections digitised to enable photo books to be made or family trees enhanced with vibrant images. Black and white originals can be coloured and negatives and slides turned into the beautiful pictures they were always intended to be.

Before and after examples of all these restorations can be seen in the galleries on this site or on my Facebook page and because every restoration is digital your original photograph, once scanned, is safely stored away so that no further harm can come to it.

I love the technical challenges involved in giving new life to a picture; (there are always several different approaches to take), but my real joy is seeing the delight it brings to my customer.

For people to see their relatives, friends or pets again after sometimes many years; and for me to hear the different stories about this specific picture or that particular person is a wonderful experience in which I am very lucky to be involved.

It may be a local rugby club celebrating its centenary some 35 years ago, (and their ensuring that the now water damaged memorial document was signed “early in the evening to ensure accuracy!”), how the very faded photograph of a prosperous great grandfather from 1895 represents his huge struggle up from very humble beginnings, or the joy on two boys’ faces after their first trip to Old Trafford, now the looming security guard has been removed!

This reaction and experience is what inspires me about each new piece of work; to ensure that after being hidden away, memorable and important images can take pride of place again.

Please get in touch if you have any questions or want to know more.

John Smith Photography

My love of photography (and restoration) comes from my dad. He has always taken pictures; printing his own for many years, developing Ilford HP4 film (as was) in Microphen developer and producing lovely, rich and contrasty prints, before he switched to digital (long before me).

I never had the patience for silver printing (though seeing a picture appear from the developer remains one of my favourite sights), so digital was a great discovery, especially the ability to wander off for a cup of tea at any time.

My interest has always been the picture not the camera, I have only used four main cameras in over
35 years, moving to digital in 2011 after several years of scanning negatives. I gained my Licentiate from the Royal Photographic Society in 2011, after years of carefully taking, making and then hiding away almost everything I took!

The photographs here (all copyright John Smith) are a mix of some of my favourites that I hope reflect the things I like to take; still mainly black and white, usually simple and very rarely moving. I hope you enjoy them.