Photo Restoration, Graphic Design and Photography by Marshall P. Reyher

Digital photo of a school bus near my house.

The yellow and red in this image are great and the contrast between the two is very striking. The original was slightly too yellow, so using Adobe Photoshop’s levels, I set the letters in the stop sign as my white point, making the colors in the image as accurate as possible.

A couple months ago I decided to buy the Kodak ESP 7 All-in-One printer, as I’d read many great reviews about it and its photo-printing capabilities. I guess if you want to print on normal non-photographic paper (documents and whatnot) or make full-bleed photos, it works fine. However, if you want to put a border around your image (so the printer does not auto-crop your image) on a photographic print, then the gloss coating (which is one of the inks in the printer’s color ink cartridge) will not print on the side borders of your image. I contacted Kodak customer service in all ways possible and they told me the same crap over and over again. After going through all the steps the Kodak techs recommended I finally decided to return the printer. Their customer service is terrible and they didn’t reply to any of the emails I sent them. So, my review is as follows: if you don’t care about your images getting cropped by the printer, get it if you want, but if you care about your images and want to print full-frame photos with a border around them so they’re not cropped, get an Epson Inkjet printer (a little more expensive, but worth it)… and don’t waste your time with the Kodak ESP 7 AIO… or any of the Kodak All-In-One Printers for that matter.

Kodak’s main selling point with this printer is its affordable ink – which is true – but if I can’t get the printer to do what I want, the cost of the ink is irrelevant.

This was an image that I retouched for a European trade publisher who prints a weekly magazine. The client wanted a black background with a slight white shadow behind the little guys. I created quite a few paths in Adobe Photoshop to silhouette all the creatures.

I took this image in Chapin, South Carolina where the scenery is just amazing. I’m going back there shortly and will have plenty of new images to post.