About dStudio Professional Photo Restoration, Giclée Printing & Art Works Photography

As has often been said, "Everyone has a story," so goes dStudio and it's evolution over the past 9 or 10 years. What you see on this website today is not how all this began. dStudio is an outgrowth of Image Group, a Chico graphic design firm since 1972. There are two paths that have led to the current business.



	The lineup: Vector Graphic (left) • Morrow ( cntr) • Mac Plus (rt)

The first path begins in 1983 when Image Group bought it's first computer, a Vector Graphics VGC 3, CP/M operating system with a whopping 64k of RAM and two 1MB, 5-1/4" floppy disk drives. We bought it used from a client for $4,500 and started down the great digital path. Next came a Morrow computer. We're uptown now, more RAM, smaller floppies and a HUGE 5MB hard drive. That's megabytes folks, not gigs! I even talked the dealer out of a very cool original Morrow poster designed and printed by the renown poster designer of the time, David Lance Goines in Berkeley. 1987 arrives, now we're chopping tall cotton, the 1MB of RAM MACs are offered. Bought four of them, kept

going and now, twenty-three years later, still going strong with MACs, along with various other pieces of digital imaging technology — wide-format printer, scanners, cameras. No turning back, no looking back, at least as far as the technology is concerned. That's path one.

Path two. This trail couldn't be more different and the tale of just how the two have come together is a bit unusual. Oddly, this part began in 1924. It's an involved story, but the gist of it is that my grandmother spent a year in Hawaii with her sister and married a Hawaiian. Fast forward to about 1999 or 2000 and while perusing my mother's photo album I spotted the two black & white pictures below. They were taken by my grandmother on the beach at Waikiki. I thought they were very cool, and for some reason I thought it would be fun to scan and make something of the two images by colorizing them to mimic old hand-tinted black & white photos. I was so impressed with the outcome that I kept going. Then a photo album from the Hawaii days was found. I was hooked on working on these pictures, but also on my Hawaii genealogy, however that is another story. Soon I was buying old photos and photo postcards on eBay and I was pulling out my own photographs that went back into the 1970s and doing digital work on those images, too. From that effort grew my photo art. You can see what that is all about, along with reworked Hawaii photos, on my site www.charlieosborn.com. Both of these efforts encouraged more investment in digital imaging technology to the point of offering services to others. The business has grown from there. This story concludes with the Portfolio examples on this site — they are the show `n tell proof of what has come from the convergence of these two seemingly unrelated paths.

Charlie Osborn

The two top photos from 1924 started the learning curve from which dStudio has evolved over the past 9 or 10 years.
(Great Aunt on left, Waikiki Beach Boy on right)