When Old Photos Get New Faces : Restoration: Couple rewrites history by adding to or subtracting from images. A frequent request: ‘Take the ex-husband out.’

Among the most interesting requests Mike and Kathy Day are getting these days has little to do with their specialty: restoration and preservation of old, treasured or historically valuable photographs.

“Take the ex-husband out of the picture,” Day says with a laugh. They get a lot of those requests.

Sometimes, Day says, the ex-hubby is right in the middle of the shot--a formal wedding group shot, for example. No problem. He and his wife manage to make the guy disappear and squeeze the remaining folks together “so that you’d think he never was there.”

Anyone would be forgiven for thinking that the Days, of Hearthstone Book Shop in Alexandria, Va., are a pair of high-tech computer whizzes, with maybe a minor in photography, who scan old photos into a computer, manipulate them electronically, then cough out new images along with a hefty bill.

In fact, Mike Day is a photographer with a degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology; his wife, an artist. And each has disdain for computers.

Their work, which has drawn the praise of the Library of Congress, the National Archives and the Smithsonian Institution, not to mention numerous private clients, is state of the art--but of a very old art.

A restorer should be considered whenever one is dealing with old or valuable photographs for which there is no usable negative or transparency from which to make new prints.

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The Days, as well as other restoration professionals, do not work directly on the original photo. To do so not only would be risky on fragile, and possibly non-archival, images, but prohibitively expensive as well. (That kind of specialized preservation work--best done on one-of-a-kind items like valuable or historic documents--can start at $35 per square inch.)

Instead, the Days take the originals and photograph them with a large-format 4-by-5-inch copy camera, which produces a huge, detail-rich negative. Then they make a large, archivally processed black-and-white work print on fiber-based paper.

It is this image on which Kathy Day works her magic, using airbrush, paints or other means to erase torn edges, eliminate unwanted elements, even create whole new backgrounds.

On contemporary photos, the Days can have some real fun--and show off their technique. “We had one client come in here looking for a gift for her brother-in-law, who was all upset at the idea of turning 50,” says Mike Day. “We decided to put him in a picture with Marilyn Monroe.”

Originally, the Days had planned to cook up a shot of the brother-in-law in bed with Marilyn, “but the photo we finally got of him had him standing up in a yard, with trees behind him, his hands in his pockets.”

As an alternative, Kathy Day combined that photo with one of Marilyn in a pair of short shorts and a jacket in such a way that you would swear the two were actually together. “Even the collar of her jacket looked like it was touching the guy-real ‘Roger Rabbit’-type stuff,” Mike Day says.

Old photo or new, once the image is restored or manipulated to the client’s wishes, Day makes another large-format photograph, this one of the new photograph that Kathy Day has restored, and, using the resulting negative, creates the finished, archivally processed image that will go to the client.

This photograph, which will have been processed to the highest archival standards of museums and the federal government, will last for centuries.

“Once we are through using the original photograph,” Mike Day says, “we urge our clients to store their originals in archival, acid-free albums or boxes.”