I have fixed some of the worst pictures imaginable, and it is anything but a labor of love.

The inspiration comes in finding what tools and which methods will yield the best results. The rest is sheer labor.

Acutally, for really bad photos, I use PhotoImpact more than Photoshop, because some of the tools can have all sorts of textures applied and Photoshop just isn't set up to do that. Try fixing wallpaper in Photoshop. No thankyou. PI is a better choice for that.

And no one program will do the whole job, then you go on the web and look for people with similar body parts, and then color them for the correct skin tone. You find shoes for people whose feet are the Nightmare Before Christmas.

(Actually, the succint version above is better than this grammatical and well-spelled rant, isn't it,and a whole lot more funny!)

Reconstruction is not fun, it is WORK!

And I became an artist because I hate WORK!, there I said it, so if there isn't something really redeeming about the whole project, go out and take the picture again, because the one square inch left of the original photo is just not worth the effort. The viewer will stand there after your effort and declare, they could have done better.

Yeah, right!