Restore an Old or Blurry Photo for a Funeral

What this is for

A funeral often leaves a family a few days, sometimes an afternoon, to find one photograph that can go on the program and beside the casket. The print in the album may be scratched, faded, or soft. Tribute Portrait restores that photograph and gives you the sizes a service uses.

You upload one picture. You see a watermarked preview next to the original before any payment. If the face does not look like them, you stop. Payment is for the files you have already looked at.

What a restoration can lift, and what it should leave alone, is in the guide linked below. This page is the service: make the portrait, check it, and download it.

What a restoration can and cannot fix

Scratches, dust, creases, and fading can lift when the face is still in the photograph. A soft scan can look clearer. A stained mount can be replaced with a quiet studio background, which also removes objects near the person. Keep the original background when a place, a uniform, or an object is part of the picture you want in the room.

The face is instructed to stay as it was: features, expression, and hair. Color stays off unless you turn it on, and that step comes with a warning, because automatic color can change skin tone and slightly alter facial features. Color already painted on the photograph is kept. If a result would change the shape of the face, the face from the photograph is the one that is kept. A very small crop can still be redrawn, because there is not enough detail to recover, and the site says so before you continue.

This is a still photograph made with AI. It does not make the person speak, and it is not a claim that someone has been brought back.

Sizes you can download

A portrait includes the restored photograph and the print files: program covers, easel portraits from 11×14 through 24×36, a prayer card, a bookmark, an obituary photo, and a 16:9 still for a slideshow. Print files are JPG and PDF, with a 0.125 inch bleed and crop marks. Names and dates are not printed onto the picture. The program text is set by whoever lays out the program.

Large easel files are prepared at a print-shop size, and the page tells you the real detail. A 16×20 is often about 150–200 pixels per inch. From a few feet away that can look clear. Up close, a smaller print will look sharper. Prefer the photograph where the face is already large in the frame.

How a family uses it the week of the service

Start with the clearest photograph you can find of the person, even if it is older than the one you first reached for. Scan a print if you can. A phone picture of a flat print can work. Glare and a curved page will show up.

Make the preview, compare it with the original, and pay only if you would hand that file to the funeral home. The print-size files are prepared after payment, usually in about two minutes, and then they are on the screen. Unpaid previews are deleted on a short timer. Paid files are kept for a limited number of days, described on the privacy page.

Take the PDF to a local photo lab or print shop that is used to crop marks, or the JPG if they asked for an image. Ask that shop which sizes it can finish today, and confirm the timing there.