Touch Up

As you may recall, it's been photo central 'round these here parts. All winter, I've been pasting 125 years of photographs into albums. That's a lot of HGTV listening, photo cornering and observing my posterior spill over its banks while sitting and piecing together genealogies and chronology.

I can sit no longer, having created five huge albums of family history. There is still a tonnage of pictures from 1980 onward. (Note to my darling children: they will be a box in the basement with your names and the word "sorry" on it. Despite what you may think, I cannot do everything. )

With family photographs on the brain, I happened to notice that one of me and my mother had deteriorated in spectacular fashion. Dissolving, creased, and torn, it looked even older than I am  it is:

(And I've been careful with the photographs from my side of the family.)

I learned from a friend that Colbert Custom Framing in Naperville restores old photos very reasonably. They will do it for you or you can steer your own Photoshop ship right in their store.

Needless to say, Christy worked her magic on this moment from 1959 in front of the apartment in New York where I grew up. Thanks to her mad skills, Mom and I now look like this:

I think we all need more Photoshop in our lives, don't you?

In true HGTV fashion, here's the before and after:

There just aren't that many pictures of me with my mother, because she was almost always the one behind the Brownie box camera. On this February day, my godmother, Betsy, took the picture, according to the careful handwriting on the back.

I think we turned out quite well.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I wasn't perked to promote Colbert's. I'm just tickled to find a place close to home that does such smart work so reasonably. Rah.)

Each week, Naperville Now participates in Mrs. Matlock's Alphabe-Thursday. See what others have to say about the letter T here.