Recycle; I Have To

We're having our home's innards repainted. Right now, my brand spanking new Dell desktop with Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 20in wide screen flat panel high resolution monitor is unplugged and set aside so the professionals can paint in that area of the house. It's like having your Porsche sitting there out of gas, and it'll be a couple of days before you can get more.

That means I can't get to all of my photos and use Elements to get them ready for the blog. So today y'all are getting a recycled blog post from my main blog, Least Significant Bits. This was a post about using Photoshop Elements to touch up scanned photographs from my family's past.

I'll get back to posting some new stuff when I get my computer back.

The following post is from January of 2007.

I'm the six year old blond kid in the white T-shirt in the photos at the bottom of the post.

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What Fun!

I've posted about a zillion pictures on this blog.

And I've talked about the old family photos I scanned on our trip to Louisiana right after Christmas.

And I've talked about how fun it is to manipulate photos, to correct them and whatnot, using Photoshop Elements.

The photos of my Dad in the Navy, that I posted yesterday, took a good bit of work to correct. They aren't perfect, but one was torn, and they just weren't in good shape.

But the difference of the photos from before and after has me totally hooked on the process of making them better.

For me, this is like having a new color photography darkroom. Only without the mess and chemicals.

The pics of my Dad from yesterday took a while to work on, but the difference from what they were as originally scanned is quite dramatic. It's fun, and the final output makes the whole process worthwhile.

In fact, it's quite addictive.

And the really fun photos to work with, are the old ones that are basically in good shape physically, but have shifted colors over the years. These photos only take about 5 or 6 different steps to make vast improvements in them.

Plus, if there isn't much to repair, like scratches, or marks, or tears, each photo only takes 2 or 3 minutes to generate a totally shocking change.

So today, I'm gonna leave you with two before-and-after photos from my childhood, that literally only took about 5 minutes to repair them both. So when a photo is in decent shape, just color shifted, the rejuvenation is quick as it is dramatic.