Touching-up and enhancing photos is not a new service for us — its what we’ve done at Yearbox since day 1. The first step when we get to work on your calendar is to open each image in Photoshop and make it look as good as it can. Usually, this means making slight adjustments in contrast or color balance. But sometimes it is more involved than that. We are happy to clean up scans of old, worn-out, faded, or cracked photos. We often enhance low-resolution images. Another frequent fix is to adjust images taken with poor lighting conditions. We’ve even gone so far as to remove an “ex” from a family photo (though we don’t recommend you make a regular habit of that!).

Whenever we get an image that is marginal or sub-standard, we always let our customer know that they might want to replace it. More often than not, however, the customer sticks with the original photo. Although we would love to always work with professional-quality, high-resolution images, we also understand that for many of our customers, a photo that is lower in quality but is “the right shot” is a better choice than a higher-quality alternative.

So why not charge extra for expert photoshop work? We sometimes get comments back from customers like: “I can’t believe what you did with that photo! It came out looking much better than I thought it would. You guys should really charge a premium for that service.” We don’t charge extra because we are not in the business of selling low-quality calendars. There are plenty of printers who will print whatever comes in the door without even looking twice at it. That’s not our game. If you are buying high-quality calendars, then making sure that the images look the best that they can should be included in the price.