Finding a decent photo for a funeral ended up being a three-day ordeal

Sifting through folders that hadn’t been touched in years

It started with a sudden realization that we had absolutely no good photos of my father. We had thousands of digital files scattered across old hard drives and cloud storage accounts, but every single one of them was either blurry, taken from a weird angle, or had some random person’s shoulder peeking into the frame. I spent an entire Sunday evening just scrolling through thumbnails, getting increasingly frustrated. Why did we never just take a proper portrait? The idea that I was looking for a ‘memorial portrait’ kept hitting me in the gut, making the task feel heavy rather than just a chore.

The struggle with low resolution and background noise

I found one photo where he looked genuinely happy, but it was from a phone camera circa 2012. The resolution was abysmal. I tried using a few free online photo editors that promised to ‘upscale’ or ‘enhance’ images, but the results were strange. The software would smooth out his skin so much that he looked like a wax doll, and the background, which I tried to replace with something neutral, ended up looking like a bad green-screen effect. I spent about three hours trying to fix the lighting in GIMP, but I just don’t have the steady hand for fine-tuning hair edges. It felt like I was making things worse with every click.

Paying for professional restoration when DIY failed

I eventually gave up on doing it myself and looked for a local Photoshop service. I was surprised at the price range; some places were charging 50,000 won for basic color correction, while others wanted upwards of 150,000 won for full restoration of an old 1980s film print. I ended up visiting a small shop near the subway station that I’d walked past a hundred times without noticing. The owner didn’t seem interested in a long conversation. He just took my thumb drive, quoted me 70,000 won, and told me to come back in two days. It felt a bit impersonal, but at that point, I was just relieved that someone who knew what they were doing was taking over.

Waiting for a result that felt right

Those two days felt longer than they should have. When I finally went back to pick up the printed portrait, I didn’t even check the screen before paying. I just wanted to get it over with. Back home, looking at the print, it was definitely clearer, but the color tone felt slightly off compared to how I remembered him. It wasn’t ‘wrong,’ just different. I kept staring at the edges of his coat where the restoration had been applied. It was sharp, professional, and entirely devoid of the messy, lived-in feeling of the original snapshots I had been looking at earlier.

Uncertainty about the final choice

Now the photo is sitting on my desk, and I’m still not entirely sure if I made the right call. I keep looking at that original blurry photo on my phone and wondering if I should have just left it alone. There is something about the imperfections of a candid shot that feels more honest, even if it wouldn’t have been ‘proper’ for a funeral setting. I’m left wondering if the standard of what we consider a respectful portrait is just something we’ve been conditioned to accept by these professional services, and if we’ve lost the ability to appreciate the messy, real-life versions of the people we lose.